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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#111

Post by ProllyInfamous »

macintux wrote: post #69
longislandguido wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "great" do you mean 8GB of non-upgradable soldered RAM in 2026?

You realize that most customer shopping for the cheapest computer they can find are not going to upgrade their RAM. And Apple is effectively committing to supporting 8GB computers with their OS upgrades for years to come.

I picked up a 15" Macbook Air (M3) for $849 — clearance @costco early 2025.

This model only has 8gb of RAM — which is fine for streaming videos/typing — it absolutely could not be my daily driver, but makes for good casual usage.

Machines probably should ship with more than that (or a lighter operating system?), particularly when the RAM isn't upgradeable. I'll recon Apple supports at least two more macOS on these 8GB configurations.

My favorite machine only has 4GB of RAM (Core2Duo Max, Win7Pro) and works good, albeit nothing modern.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#112

Post by lukeh »

Still rocking a 2019 (Intel) Mac Pro here, all slots filled with various Pro Tools and UAD DSP cards, SSD, GPU, etc. I'm planning to get as much mileage out of it as I can. I'm sure a Studio would be more performant, but the Thunderbolt to PCIe chassis are not cheap.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#114

Post by bigyabai »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #48
longislandguido wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> simp: be excessively attentive or submissive to a person in whom one is romantically or sexually interested. This word does not appear to be in any way relevant. You do not have to buy a MacBook Neo, but approximately everyone else in the low-end laptop market will. If you think it is a bad product, go buy some Acer stock.

> but approximately everyone else in the low-end laptop market will.

No, they won't. People repeat this, but Macs constitute a minority of the low-end market and will continue to for the foreseeable future.

This has been the case when $400 Retina Intel Macbooks were flooding the used market; it was the case when Costco sold $700 M1 MBAs. If you cannot extrapolate what will happen with the $600 laptop, then I don't think you have payed attention to what the market is buying.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#115

Post by JumpCrisscross »

zer00eyz wrote: post #70
readitalready wrote: post #59

Apple really dropped the ball here. They had every ability to make something competitive with Nvidia for AI training as well as inference, by selling high end multi GPU Mac Pro workstations as well as servers, but for some reason chose not to. They had the infrastructure and custom SoCs and everything. What a waste. It really could have been a bigger market for them than even the iPhone.

> something competitive with Nvidia for AI training Apple is counting on something else: model shrink. Every one is now looking at "how do we make these smaller". At some point a beefy Mac Studio and the "right sized" model is going to be what people want. Apple dumped a 4 pack of them in the hands of a lot of tech influencers a few months back and they were fairly interesting (expensive tho).

> Apple is counting on something else: model shrink

The most powerful AI interactions I've had involved giving a model a task and then fucking off. At that point, I don't actually care if it takes 5 minutes or an hour. I've cued up a list of background tasks it can work on, and that I can circle back to when I have time. In that context, smaller isn't even the virtue at hand–user patience is. Having a machine that works on my bullshit questions and modelling projects at one tenth the speed of a datacentre could still work out to being a good deal even before considering the privacy and lock-in problems.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#116

Post by bigyabai »

wmf wrote: post #36
al_borland wrote: post #2

They've been trying to kill the Mac Pro for over a decade. I wonder how long before they backtrack again? It seems like they should at least have a migration path for users who needed the expansion cards the Mac Pro supported. Pushing them to the PC seems pretty bad. Apple's new "Pro" definition seems more like "Prosumer".

The migration path is Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures (basically eGPU enclosures but you don't have to use a GPU).

> but you don't have to use a GPU

That's a cute way of saying that GPUs aren't supported.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#117

Post by aurareturn »

vlovich123 wrote: post #71
readitalready wrote: post #59

Apple really dropped the ball here. They had every ability to make something competitive with Nvidia for AI training as well as inference, by selling high end multi GPU Mac Pro workstations as well as servers, but for some reason chose not to. They had the infrastructure and custom SoCs and everything. What a waste. It really could have been a bigger market for them than even the iPhone.

Don’t mistake stock market performance for revenue. NVIDIA makes ~200B annually, same as what Apple makes from iPhones. It’s a big market but GPUs aren’t just AI.

$280b and growing 70% YoY.

$1t backlog in orders in next 2 years.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#118

Post by aurareturn »

readitalready wrote: post #78
vlovich123 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t mistake stock market performance for revenue. NVIDIA makes ~200B annually, same as what Apple makes from iPhones. It’s a big market but GPUs aren’t just AI.

I'm purely talking in terms of revenue. There's a huge demand for AI systems from personal workstations to datacenter servers, and Apple was one of the few companies in the world in a position to build complete systems for it. But for some reason Apple thought the sound recording engineer or the video editor market was more important... like, WTF dude? Have some vision at least!

Some people at Apple see it. That’s why they added matmul to M5 GPU and keep mentioning LMStudio in their marketing.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#119

Post by zer00eyz »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #76
zer00eyz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something competitive with Nvidia for AI training Apple is counting on something else: model shrink. Every one is now looking at "how do we make these smaller". At some point a beefy Mac Studio and the "right sized" model is going to be what people want. Apple dumped a 4 pack of them in the hands of a lot of tech influencers a few months back and they were fairly interesting (expensive tho).

Cheaper than what you’d expect though. You could get a nice setup for $20-40k 6mo ago. As far as enterprise investments go, that’s a rounding error.

Drop that down to 5k, and make it useful.

Give every iPhone family a in house Siri that will deal with canceling services and pursuing refunds.

Your customer screw up results in your site getting an agent drive DDOS on its CS department till you give in.

Siri: "Hey User, here's your daily update, I see you haven't been to the gym, would you like me to harass their customer service department till they let you out of their onerous contract?"

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#120

Post by jasoneckert »

As someone who came from the SGI O2/Octane era when high-end workstations were compact, distinctive, and sexy, I’ve never really understood the allure of the Mac Pro, with the exception of the 2013 Mac Pro tube, which I owned (small footprint, quiet, and powerful).

For me, aesthetics and size are important. That workstation on your desk should justify its presence, not just exist as some hulking box.

When Apple released the Mac Studio, it made perfect sense from a form-factor point-of-view. The internal expansion slots in the M2 Mac Pro didn't make any sense. It was like a bag of potato chips - mostly air. And far too big and ugly to be part of my work area! I'm surprised that Apple didn't discontinue it sooner.

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