I’m much less concerned about the Mac Pro and more concerned we won’t see an XDR Ultra Display to replace the 32”.
They did come out with a new XDR. It’s just not 32”.
Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> 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
This is delusion. The retail price point right now for comparable PC laptops is $429 and they ship with DOUBLE the RAM and storage (16GB, 512GB).
For the same specs as the Neo we are talking There is NO market for this device. Apple is catering to the welfare crowd with this one, except anyone in that situation would opt for a PC at half the price.
Like trying to sell a Cadillac with a park bench for seats to save money. It makes no sense.
Bookmark this post, the Neo will be discontinued within two years. It will join the original MacBook on the scrap heap of Apple products that should have never been.
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#133Apple 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.
Nah, Apple made the right choice. Nobody except a niche market of hobbyists is interested in running tiny quantized models.
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#134Reading comments, I don’t think people are being completely fair here. For Intel and AMD to approach what Apple has accomplished they’re making many of the same compromises with Panther Lake and Ryzen AI Max. Apple chose to put disk controllers on their SoP rather than having them on the storage module. This shaves a tiny bit of latency. Worth it? No idea. I’m shit at hardware design. As for not having a Pro or other…
They have tried variations of this since time immemorial (we can argue about "price reasonablé") but there's just not much you can do with it that you can't do much cheaper or simpler in other ways. The Xserve has been dead for 15 years now, and it was never tremendously amazing (though it was nice kit). Apple apparently has some sort of "in-house" xserve-like thing they don't sell; but turning that into a product wo…
WSJ recently did a thing about it but details were rather light
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#135I think that's an expected thing. G5 was the thing. And companies were buying G5 and other macs like that all the time, because you were able to actually extend it with video cards and some special equipment. But now we have M chips. You don't need video for M chips. You kinda do, but truthfully, it's cheaper to buy a beefier Mac than to install a video card. Pro was a great thing for designers and video editors, tho…
> gone are the days of PCIe This is a wild and very wrong take. Just about every single consumer computer shipped today uses PCIe. If you were referring to only only the physical PCIe slots, that's wrong too: the vast majority of desktop computers, servers, and workstations shipped in 2025 had physical PCIe slots (the only ones that didn't were Macs and certain mini-PCs). The 2023 Mac Pro was dead on arrival because…
Yup the 4090 and SoundBlaster ZXR in my AM5 7800X3D system would both like to upvote your reply.
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#136As 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 relea…
As someone who worked on the M2 Mac Pro and has a real soft spot for it, I get it. It’s horrendously expensive and doesn’t offer much benefit over a Mac Studio and a thunderbolt pci chassis. My personal dream is that vms would support pci pass through and so you can just spin up a Linux vm and let it drive the gpus. But at that point, why are you buying a Mac? Opinions are my own obvs.
> My personal dream is that vms would support pci pass through and so you can just spin up a Linux vm and let it drive the gpus.
SR-IOV is just that? and is well supported by both Windows and Linux.
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#137Apple 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.
Just about everybody who isn't Nvidia dropped the ball, bigtime. Intel should have shipped their GPUs with much more VRAM from day one. If they had done this, they'd have carved out a massive niche and much more market share, and it would have been trivially simple to do. AMD should have improved their tools and software, etc. Apple should have done as you say. Google had nigh on a decade to boost TPU production, and…
> And thus Nvidia is, now quite durably, the most valuable company in the world.
Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world right up until the AI bubble pops. Which, while it's hard to nail down when, is going to happen. I wouldn't call their position durable at all.
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#138As 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 relea…
> aesthetics and size are important
It's dumb from a practical perspective. But I keep hoping they'll vertically compress their trashcan design so it looks like their Cupertino headquarters.
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#139Apple 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).
> At some point a beefy Mac Studio and the "right sized" model is going to be what people want.
It's pretty clear that this isn't going to happen any time soon, if ever. You can't shrink the models without destroying their coherence, and this is a consistently robust observation across the board.
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#140Earlier 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.
Not all enterprises are the same, I imagine many companies have different departments working with local optimums, so someone who could benefit from it to get more productivity might not have access to it because the department that is doing hardware acquisition is being measured in isolation.