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

181–190 of 672 posts

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#181

Post by wpm »

zozbot234 wrote: post #176
HerbManic wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Thunderbol…

Why everyone wants to live in dongle/external cabling/dock hell is beyond me. PCIe cards are powered internally with no extra cables. They are secure. They do not move or fall off of shit. They do not require cable management or external power supplies. They do not have to talk to the CPU through a stupid USB hub or a Thunderbolt dock. Crappy USB HDMI capture on my Mac led me to running a fucking PC with slots to capture video off of a 50 foot HDMI cable, that then streamed the feed to my Mac from NDI, because it was more reliable than the elgarbo capture dongle I was using. This shit is bad. It sucks. It's twice the price and half the quality of a Blackmagic Design capture card. But, no slots, so I guess I can go get fucked.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#182

Post by rogerrogerr »

longislandguido wrote: post #132
rogerrogerr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. L…

I have firsthand knowledge that at least one incumbent household name PC manufacturer is in a state of panic over the Neo. This is from an organization that would be predisposed to believing what you’re saying, but instead they’re revising internal forecasts and executives are freaking out.

I have no interest in arguing further, it benefits me nothing. But sure, let’s revisit it in two years.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#183

Post by labcomputer »

GeekyBear wrote: post #67
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…

Thunderbolt is PCIe running over a cable.

Sure, with expensive line drivers to send the data 1+ meters, instead of 10ish cm. And with only 2 channels instead of up to 16.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#184

Post by wpm »

aprilnya wrote: post #47
magic_hamster wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gone are the days of PCIe. My GPU, NVMe drives and motherboard might disagree.

- GPU is integrated into the SoC - Surprisingly, it is possible to plug a drive into a TB/USB port …so what do you actually need PCIe for?

Video capture

I/O expansion

Networking

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#185

Post by HerbManic »

aurareturn wrote: post #117
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.

$280b and growing 70% YoY. $1t backlog in orders in next 2 years.

Those back log orders are wild! One does wonder that if the bubble collapses or more global upsets happen in that time, how many of those will ever be fulfilled? Reality might be not so impressive, but considering if it fell even 80%, that is still $200 B in revenue and that is huge.

Remember when a $1 billion valuation used to be a big thing? That is nothing compared with nowadays.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#186

Post by kyboren »

sipjca wrote: post #152
root_axis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Yes, but bigger models are still more capable. Models shrinking (iso-performance) just means that people will train and use more capable models with a longer context.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#187

Post by wpm »

Arcanum-XIII wrote: post #172
sundvor wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Then they should start putting internal high powered USB ports inside the case where I can literally bolt this shit into place because my desk is a goddamn mess of cables and dongles and boxes that don't stack or interlock or interface at all and I am so so utterly tired of being gaslit into beliving that they're just as good as a fucking slot.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#189

Post by HerbManic »

sipjca wrote: post #152
root_axis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I have said for a while that we need a sort of big-little-big model situation.

The inputs are parsed with a large LLM. This gets passed on to a smaller hyper specific model. That outputs to a large LLM to make it readable.

Essentially you can blend two model type. Probabilistic Input > Deterministic function > Probabilistic Output. Have multiple little determainistic models that are choose for specific tasks. Now all of this is VERY easy to say, and VERY difficult to do.

But if it could be done, it would basically shrink all the models needed. Don't need a huge input/output model if it is more of an interpreter.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#190

Post by rubyn00bie »

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…

I don't think Apple just stumbled into it, and while I totally agree that Apple is killing it with their unified memory, I think we're going to see a pivot from NVidia and AMD. The biggest reason, I think, is: OpenAI has committed to enormous amount capex it simply cannot afford. It does not have the lead it once did, and most end-users simply do not care. There are no network effects. Anthropic at this point has completely consumed, as far as I can tell, the developer market. The one market that is actually passionate about AI. That's largely due to huge advantage of the developer space being, end users cannot tell if an "AI" coded it or a human did. That's not true for almost every other application of AI at this point.

If the OpenAI domino falls, and I'd be happy to admit if I'm wrong, we're going to see a near catastrophic drop in prices for RAM and demand by the hyperscalers to well... scale. That massive drop will be completely and utterly OpenAI's fault for attempting to bite off more than it can chew. In order to shore up demand, we'll see NVidia and AMD start selling directly to consumers. We, developers, are consumers and drive demand at the enterprises we work for based on what keeps us both engaged and productive... the end result being: the ol' profit flywheel spinning.

Both NVidia and AMD are capable of building GPUs that absolutely wreck Apple's best. A huge reason for this is Apple needs unified memory to keep their money maker (laptops) profitable and performant; and while, it helps their profitability it also forces them into less performant solutions. If NVidia dropped a 128GB GPU with GDDR7 at $4k-- absolutely no one would be looking for a Mac for inference. My 5090 is unbelievably fast at inference even if it can't load gigantic models, and quite frankly the 6-bit quantized versions of Qwen 3.5 are fantastic, but if it could load larger open weight models I wouldn't even bother checking Apple's pricing page.

tldr; competition is as stiff as it is vicious-- Apple's "lead" in inference is only because NVidia and AMD are raking in cash selling to hyperscalers. If that cash cow goes tits up, there's no reason to assume NVidia and AMD won't definitively pull the the rug out from Apple.

Post reply on HN