Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 672 posts

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#151

Post by dijit »

bigyabai wrote: post #127
dijit wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I don't care, but Apples SSDs don't have a storage controller on them, and those adapters are designed to "bypass" the controller on m.2 drives. You can argue that it's different for the sake of being different, but A) I personally don't always hold that monopoly is a good thing, even if we agree m.2 is fairly decent it doesn't make it universally the best. B) I'd make the argument that Apple is competing ve…

That is an absolutely awful argument against what I just said. I can tell that you don't care. Tens of thousands of mini PC and laptop boards ship with multiple M.2 slots. Apple can use both connectors, with the exact same caveats that normal M.2 SSDs have on ordinary filesystems. Apple does not have to enable swap, zram, or other high-wear settings on macOS if they are uncomfortable with the inconsistency of M.2 dri…

I don't buy that argument, "a PC by any other name" is what made intel mac's somewhat uncompetitive when compared to the M-series laptops: which are currently dominating with total vertical integration of the OS and hardware.

Also: All things being equal, the lightening connector was technically superior to USB-C and arrived much earlier.. so it's somewhat on the same path.

USB-C succeeded due to a confluence of;

A) Being a standard people can get behind. (lightning was, of course, much more awkwardly licensed)

B) Lightning never got a sufficient uplift from USB-2.0 performance.

C) The EU eventually killed lightening through regulation.

It was, however, smaller, more durable and (as mentioned) earlier.

I'm totally not against our new USB-C everywhere situation w.r.t. phones, but if anything it reinforces the point: The technically superior thing being too proprietary caused its death (despite being early).

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#152

Post by sipjca »

root_axis wrote: post #139
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).

> 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.

I don’t think it’s about literally shrinking the models via quantization, but rather training smaller/more efficient models from scratch

Smaller models have gotten much more powerful the last 2 years. Qwen 3.5 is one example of this. The cost/compute requirements of running the same level intelligence is going down

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#153

Post by moogly »

jasoneckert wrote: post #120

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 relea…

> That workstation on your desk should

Under your desk, right? Right?!

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#154

Post by steve-atx-7600 »

musicale wrote: post #123

I feel like Apple is going back to the days of toaster "appliance" Macs. No slots, no upgrades, just buy a new one in 3-7 years.

I hate how I can't buy an new apple silicon with upgradeable RAM or SSD. Is there a legit reason why they couldn't make these things upgradeable at all even on a studio machine? 4TB is the smallest SSD I ever want in a new machine, but buying one from Apple is stupidly expensive. Back in the intel days, I'd buy a macbook pro, for example, with less ram and a smaller SSD than the max available and then upgrade to much cheaper aftermarket parts a few years later when prices dropped.

I'm still not going to use windows or linux. Don't want to be an IT guy on the side just to keep linux machines working. This may not be obvious to some unless you try to use printers and scanners that are more than 5 years old and what them to be on the network. And, you don't install virtualization tools like vmware that require compiling and loading kernel drivers which ends up being incompatible with new OS releases...etc.

Windows is just too much of a painful acceptance of mediocrity and apathy in product design for me.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#155

Post by TheDong »

markn951 wrote: post #129
matthewfcarlson wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Opinions are my own obvs. Whose else would they be?

> as someone who worked on the m2 mac pro

They're trying to make it very clear they're not speaking on behalf of Apple Inc, despite having worked (or working) there.

Big companies like to give employees some minimal "media training", which mostly amounts to "do not speak for the company, do not say anything that might even slightly sound like you're speaking for the company".

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#156

Post by dijit »

bombcar wrote: post #98
testing22321 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was always strange the Apple Silicon kept the 1.3kw power supply which was massive overkill. I always hoped we’d get a consumer version of what they have internally - 10 or 20 or more Apple Silicon chips for 1000 cores or so.

A bunch of the Mac Pro decisions seem to have been more driven by "we have a warehouse of these parts" than "this is what the system needs".

A lot of Apples offerings feel a bit like that actually.

To be expected when lord of the supply chain Tim Cook is running the show.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#158

Post by Marsymars »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #102
waz0wski wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just replaced a 2009 MacPro It had many hardware upgrades over the years - upgraded CPUs, 128GB RAM, 4TB NVME storage, a modern AMD GPU, USB3/c, thunderbolt, etc The only reason it got replaced is because it became too much of a PITA to keep modern OSX running on it (via OCLP) Replaced with an M4 Max Mac Studio, which is a nice and faster machine but with no ability to upgrade anything and much worse hardware resal…

I'm a former 4,1 user, myself — replaced with an M2Pro mini Jan 2023 (finally retired fully 2025). Absolutely recommend you purchase the 4-bay Terramaster external enclosure — gives you four SATA slots that are hot-swappable (unlike MacPro's). 10gbps via USB-C.

Are SMART attributes independently readable on that? (Or any multi-drive USB-C enclosures?)

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#159

Post by jeffbee »

I guess A/V pros are used to getting screwed constantly, but it must be really irritating to face the prospect of eventually having to move PCI add-in cards to TB5 enclosures that cost $1000 per slot.
Post reply on HN