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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#191

Post by aloha2436 »

steve-atx-7600 wrote: post #154
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…

> Is there a legit reason why they couldn't make these things upgradeable at all even on a studio machine?

For the SSD, no. For the memory, yes. The memory lives on the same chip as the CPU and the GPU, it's even more tightly bound than just being soldered on. The memory being there has legitimate technical benefits that make it much easier/cheaper for them to reach the extremely high memory bandwidths that they do.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#192

Post by wpm »

dangus wrote: post #14

> Serviceable, repairable, upgradable Macs are officially a thing of the past. Well, not exactly. Apple’s desktop Macs actually all have modular SSD storage, and third parties sell upgrade kits. And it’s not like Thunderbolt is a slouch as far as expandability. I can see why the Mac Pro is gone. Yeah, it has PCIe slots…that I don’t really think anyone is using. It’s not like you can drop an RTX 5090 in there. The lat…

Thunderbolt absolutely is a slouch.

Every PCIe card I have requires it's own $150+ PCIe to Thunderbolt Dock and its own picoPSU plus 12V power supply.

External PCIe is convenient for portables. Not for desktops. It's a piss-poor replacement for a proper PCIe slot.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#193

Post by Intermernet »

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…

Personally, I'd love to see / read / hear more about the way RME do what they do. I know they basically update the fpga on the devices in lock step with the drivers, which allows them to do all sorts of magic (low CPU usage, zero latency recording of each raw channel being one of them) but I'd love an interview or article from some of the hardware and software people from RME. They have been rock solid and basically future proof for decades and I think the entire hardware and software industries could learn something from the way they do things.

Incredible products, definitely worth the premium.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#194

Post by wpm »

badc0ffee wrote: post #12
pjmlp wrote: post #4

Now everyone that needs classical workstations can finally move on into Linux or Windows workloads. Believe t-shirts at WWDC were not enough. Thus the workstation market joins OS X Server.

Apple still sells a workstation-type machine: the Mac Studio.

It's not at all a workstation type machine. It's a Mac Mini with bigger SoCs and better cooling.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#195

Post by aurareturn »

HerbManic wrote: post #185
aurareturn wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

Just look at the price of H100 cloud rental prices. Demand is increasing.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#197

Post by wtallis »

angoragoats wrote: post #63
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…

> 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…

> This is a wild and very wrong take.

That's what happens when you quote only part of a statement. Taken in context, it was referring to a very real decline in expansion cards. Now that NICs (for WiFi) and SSDs have been moved into their own compact specialized slots, and Ethernet and audio have been standard integrated onto the motherboard itself for decades, the regular PCIe slots are vestigial. They simply are not widely used anymore for expanding a PC with a variety of peripherals (that era was already mostly over by the transition from 32-bit PCIe to PCIe).

Across all desktop PCs, the most common number of slots filled is one (a single GPU), and the average is surely less than one (systems using zero slots and relying on integrated graphics must greatly outnumber systems using more than one slot).

Even GPUs themselves are a horrible argument in favor of PCIe slots. The form factor is wildly unsuitable for a high-power compute accelerator, because it's ultimately derived from a 1980s form factor that prioritized total PCB area above all else, and made zero provisions for cards needing a heatsink and fan(s).

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#198

Post by KennyBlanken »

waz0wski wrote: post #27
w-m wrote: post #6

While the trash can generation was somewhat present and around, I don't think I ever saw a cheese grater in the flesh. Did it have any users? Were there any actual useful expansion cards? Did anybody continue buying this at all, after it didn't get the M3 Ultra bump, that the Mac Studio got last year?

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…

If you were using a 2009 Mac Pro for work until a year or two ago then you seriously need to think about how much your time is worth and how much of your time you were wasting by "saving money" on not buying a new computer.

If you're self employed, the cost of equipment and depreciation make hanging on to that 2009 system even more of a poor choice.

If you were still using a 2009 system I don't see why you'd "have to replace in 2-3 years."

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#199

Post by rkagerer »

labcomputer wrote: post #179
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…

> USB-C oscilloscopes work because the peripheral contains all the hardware, so it doesn't particularly matter that the device->host latency is high.

Yeah, that's basically the way accessories have gone. Powerful mcu's and soc's have gotten cheap enough to make it viable. Makes me a little sad though, I liked having low latency "GPIO's" straight to software running on my PC (but I'm thinking as far back as the parallel port... love how simple that was).

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#200

Post by bschwindHN »

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.

> They had the infrastructure and custom SoCs and everything. What a waste.

What are they wasting, exactly?

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