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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#171

Post by zozbot234 »

whalesalad wrote: post #89
IFC_LLC wrote: post #26

I 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…

it's not just about pcie, it's socketed memory and disks. I guess disks are just pcie technically - but memory sockets are great. hell, in the pro chassis I am surprised they didn't opt for a socketed cpu that could be upgraded.

The latest M2-based Mac Pro did not take socketed memory AIUI.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#172

Post by Arcanum-XIII »

sundvor wrote: post #135
angoragoats wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sound card works fine on USB2 (RME for example has cards on USB2 that can manage 30/30 io at 192khz without issue at low latency if you have the CPU to deal with the load)

With USB3 you have 94 i/o…

For years pci has not been mandatory for audio. UAD, Apogee, RME and other high end brands will push you to them. Or even only provide them as usb device… even Thunderbolt is not needed here.

And that’s been the case for a while! My Fireface UC from 15 years ago can deal with 16 channels at 96khz at 256 sample. On PC and Mac.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#173

Post by HerbManic »

chatmasta wrote: post #165

I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been…

Jeff Geerling doing that 1.5TB cluster using 4 Mac Studios was pretty much all the proof needed to demo how the Mac Pro is struggling to find any place any more.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/15-tb-vram-on-mac-stu...

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#174

Post by giantrobot »

system2 wrote: post #56

If I remember correctly, the maximum configuration was something like $35k back in the day. I wonder what those people feel like now. On the other hand, if they have $35k to burn, probably they don't even think about it.

If you spend $35k and just idle the machine or just check e-mail you've burnt the money. If it's your work machine and you've got a $100/hr billable rate it's paid for in a little over a month. Three months at a $50/hr rate.

If you bought the $35k Mac Pro in 2023 when it was released and have a $50/hr rate it's been paid off for about 30 months. So as of today those owners probably aren't too broken hearted. They'll likely get at least another three years out of them.

People buying $35k Mac Pros probably paid them off after a single contract. So they've just been making money rather than costing money.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#175

Post by wtallis »

angoragoats wrote: post #105
rayiner wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it’s probably reflective of the fact that GPUs generally aren’t PCIe-bandwidth bound. Also, TB5 and Oculink2 both use PCI 4.0 x4 links.

Oculink is generally faster than TB5 despite them both using PCIe 4.0, because Oculink provides direct PCIe access whereas Thunderbolt has to route all PCIe traffic through its controller. The benchmarks show that the overhead introduced by the TB5 controller slows down GPU performance.

It's not just the controllers; the Thunderbolt protocol itself imposes different speed limits. The bit rates used by Thunderbolt aren't the same as PCIe, and PCIe traffic gets encapsulated in Thunderbolt packets.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#176

Post by zozbot234 »

HerbManic wrote: post #173
chatmasta wrote: post #165

I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been…

Jeff Geerling doing that 1.5TB cluster using 4 Mac Studios was pretty much all the proof needed to demo how the Mac Pro is struggling to find any place any more. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/15-tb-vram-on-mac-stu...

But those Thunderbolt links are slower than modern PCIe. If there's actually a M5-based Mac Studio with the same Thunderbolt support, you'll be better off e.g. for LLM inference, streaming read-only model weights from storage as we've seen with recent experiments than pushing the same amount of data via Thunderbolt. It's only if you want to go beyond local memory constraints (e.g. larger contexts) that the Thunderbolt link becomes useful.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#177

Post by HerbManic »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #137
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is definitely a case that they will fall a long way but Nvidia will not fail as a whole. They have a way of maximizing their position relentlessly. CUDA turns out to endlessly put them in amazing positions on things like image recognition, AR, Crypto and now AI.

For all the faults of them leaning in hard on these things for stock market and personal gains, Nvidia still has some of the best quality products around. That is their saving grace.

They will not be the world most valuable company once the bubble pops, will probably never get back there again, but they will continue to be a decent enough business. I just want them going back to talking about graphics more than AI again, that will be nice.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#179

Post by labcomputer »

IFC_LLC wrote: post #26

I 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…

> And as for extensions - gone are the days of PCIe. Audio cards and other specialized equipment works and lives just fine on USB-C and Thunderbolt.

Grumble grumble. Well, there used to more than audio cards, back before the first time Apple canceled the Mac Pro and released the 2013 Studio^H^H Trash Can^H^H Mac Pro.

Then everyone stopped writing Mac drivers because why bother. So when they brought the PCIe Pro back in 2019, there wasn't much to put in it besides a few Radeon cards that Apple commissioned.

The nice thing about PCIe is the low latency, so you can build all sorts of fun data acquisition and real time control applications. It's also much cheaper because you don't need multi-gigabit SERDES that can drive a 1m line. That's why LabVIEW (originally a Mac exclusive) and NI-DAQ no longer exist on Mac.

USB-C oscilloscopes work because the peripheral contains all the hardware, so it doesn't particularly matter that the device->host latency is high. They also don't require much bandwidth because triggering happens inside the peripheral, and only the triggered waveform record is sent a few dozen times per second.

> It's not the Mac's or Apple's fault. We are actually live in the age where systems are quite independent and do not require direct installations.

It is, and we don't. Maybe you don't notice it, but others do.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#180

Post by rudedogg »

aurareturn wrote: post #118
readitalready wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their rule of only releasing major software updates once a year in June is holding them back IMO. Their local LLM apis were dated before macOS/iOS 26 was even released. Just because something worked 20 years ago doesn’t mean it works today, but I’m sure it’s hard to argue against a historically successful strategy internally.
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