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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#201

Post by bigyabai »

kube-system wrote: post #101
longislandguido wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "great" do you mean 8GB of non-upgradable soldered RAM in 2026?

It's not like Apple soldered some plain old DDR5 to a PCB to be difficult: 1. It's TSMC's InFO_POP, which has significant performance benefits. 2. There weren't even any modules that existed for LPDDR until very recently. (and while the A18 was being designed, it didn't exist) 3. The power/price/performance/thermals they are able to achieve with this configuration is not possible with socketed RAM. You are asking the…

The "Mac memory is special" shtick is getting old. macOS is a heavy OS, 8gb is an objective liability to the SSD lifespan.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#203

Post by raincole »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #115
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).

> Apple is counting on something else: model shrink The most powerful AI interactions I've had involved giving a model a task and then fucking off. At that point, I don't actually care if it takes 5 minutes or an hour. I've cued up a list of background tasks it can work on, and that I can circle back to when I have time. In that context, smaller isn't even the virtue at hand–user patience is. Having a machine that wo…

Cool? And it has nothing to do with what kind of consumer hardware Apple should sell. If your use cases are literally "bigger model better" then the you should always use cloud. No matter how much computing power Apple squeezes into their device it won't be a mighty data center.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#204

Post by GeekyBear »

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…

Wasn't streaming models from storage into limited memory a case where it was impressive that you could make the elephant dance at all?

If you want to get usable speeds from very large models that haven't been quantitized to death on local machines, RDMA over Thunderbolt enables that use case.

Consumer PC GPUs don't have enough RAM, enterprise GPUs that can handle the load very well are obscenely expensive, Strix Halo tops out at 128 Gigs of RAM and is limited on Thunderbolt ports.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#205

Post by wtallis »

wpm wrote: post #181
zozbot234 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cap…

For anything that's even somewhat in the consumer space rather than pure workstation/professional, the main reason is that dongles can be used with a laptop but add-in cards can't. When ordinary consumer PCs (or even office PCs) are in the picture, laptops are a huge chunk of the target audience.

The market segments that can afford to ignore laptops and only target permanently-installed desktops are mostly those niches where the desktop is installed alongside some other piece of equipment that is much more expensive.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#206

Post by lloeki »

aloha2436 wrote: post #191
steve-atx-7600 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This, although it's not merely "easier/cheaper", it's "impossible" (unless you sacrifice a ton of performance)

Same reason as a) GDDR on dGPUs (I think I read somewhere that GDDR is very much like regular DDR, just with much tighter paths and thus soldered in) and b) Framework Desktop (performance would reportedly halve if RAM were not soldered)

SSD reasons I seem to recall are architectural for security: some parts (controller?) that usually sit on a NVMe SSD are embedded in the SoC next to (or inside?) the secure enclave processor or whatever the equivalent of the T2 thing is in Mx chips, so what you'd swap would be a bank of raw storage chips which don't match the controller.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#207

Post by jmalicki »

rkagerer wrote: post #199
labcomputer wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 parall…

It's not just that - anything working with analog signals benefits hugely from not living inside the complete EM interference nightmare of the computer case.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#208

Post by buccal »

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…

Well there is https://www.crowdsupply.com/eevengers/thunderscope

With USB4/TB you can get quite far in both latency and throughput. Actually there are network adapters with TB connection that are just TB to PCIe adapters and PCIe network card.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#209

Post by hulitu »

> Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

They replaced it with Mac Neo. Did you notice the wonderful build quality, the accesible price and that everyone is buying it ? And it has USB: U from universal.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#210

Post by mrkpdl »

The 2019 Mac Pro’s main purpose was to provide much needed reassurance that Apple cared about the Mac. In prior years the quality of the Macs had fallen over all product lines. And the question of does Apple care about the Mac at all was a legitimate one.

This Mac Pro was about resetting and giving a clear signal that Apple was willing to invest in the Mac far more than it was about ‘slots’.

Today, Mac hardware is the best it has ever been, and no one is reasonably questioning apple’s commitment to a Mac hardware.

So it makes sense for the Mac Pro to make a graceful exit.

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