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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#271

Post by AnthonyMouse »

kmeisthax wrote: post #143
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…

I'm surprised they even tried selling an Apple Silicon Mac Pro - I expected that product to die the moment they announced the transition. Everything that makes Apple Silicon great also makes it garbage for high-performance workstations. The allure of the Mac Pro is that you could dodge the Apple Tax by loading it up with RAM and compute accelerators Apple couldn't mark up. Well, Apple Silicon works against all of tha…

> An Ultra class chip has like 16 memory channels, which even in a 1-DIMM per channel routing would have trace lengths long enough to bottleneck operating frequency.

CAMM fixes this, right?

> Actually, it's a detriment, because price-discovery-enforcing scalpers can rip RAM out of perfectly working computers and resell the RAM. It's way harder to scalp RAM that's soldered on the board.

Scalping isn't a thing unless you were selling below the market price to begin with which, even with the higher prices, Apple isn't doing and would have no real reason to do.

Notice that in real life it only really happens with concert tickets and that's because of scam sandwich that is Ticketmaster.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#272

Post by balamatom »

wpm wrote: post #187
Arcanum-XIII wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like a 9.5" mini rack could help with the stacking, see Geerling.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#273

Post by Lio »

longislandguido wrote: post #29

[flagged]

This is just silly. In what way is a $600 netbook their flagship product when then also ship wildly successful 128GB MacBook Pros and 256GB Mac Studios?

I was more disapointed when they dropped the 512GB Mac Studio than I am the loss of the Mac Pro. My hope is that they'll launch something really useful at the WWDC to make up for that.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#274

Post by AnthonyMouse »

rayiner wrote: post #222
mrheosuper wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your example uses GTX1080, which is a very old GPU. Current flagship consumer GPU will take a harder hit on low bandwidth PCIE.

Here’s more recent HW: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/impact-of-gpu-pci... This is an RTX4080. “In the more common situations of reducing PCI-e bandwidth to PCI-e 4.0 x8 from 4.0 x16, there was little change in content creation performance: There was only an average decrease in scores of 3% for Video Editing and motion graphics. In more extreme situations (such as running at 4.0 x4 / 3.0 x8), this changed…

A 10% performance reduction seems like a lot to be leaving on the table.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#275

Post by greggsy »

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 didn’t drop the ball at all?

They want to be able to sell handsets, desktops and laptops to their customer base.

Pursing a product line that would consume the finite amount of silicon manufacturing resources away from that user base would be corporate suicide.

Even nvidia has all but dropped support for its traditional gaming customer base to satisfy its new strategy.

At any rate, the local inference capabilities are only going to get cheaper and more accessible over the coming years, and Apple are probably better placed than anyone to make it happen.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#276

Post by mrheosuper »

rayiner wrote: post #222
mrheosuper wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your example uses GTX1080, which is a very old GPU. Current flagship consumer GPU will take a harder hit on low bandwidth PCIE.

Here’s more recent HW: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/impact-of-gpu-pci... This is an RTX4080. “In the more common situations of reducing PCI-e bandwidth to PCI-e 4.0 x8 from 4.0 x16, there was little change in content creation performance: There was only an average decrease in scores of 3% for Video Editing and motion graphics. In more extreme situations (such as running at 4.0 x4 / 3.0 x8), this changed…

The article is nearly 3 years old and the 4080 is not even top of the line at the written time.

Still, 10% in difference is still considerable, almost gen-to-gen difference

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#277

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #138
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…

> aesthetics and size are important It's dumb from a practical perspective. But I keep hoping they'll vertically compress their trashcan design so it looks like their Cupertino headquarters.

The very definition of a halo product.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#278

Post by fotcorn »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #246
robotswantdata wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DGX workstations, expensive but allow PCI cards as well. https://marketplace.nvidia.com/en-us/enterprise/personal-ai-...

How much do those workstations cost? All of the different manufacturers links on that page lack pricing info and you have to contact them for pricing.

Cheapest i know if is around $96k

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#279

Post by wolfhumble »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #256
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…

Agreed. I’m planning on selling my 512GB M3 Ultra Studio in the next week or so (I just wrenched my back so I’m on bed-rest for the next few days) with an eye to funding the M5 Ultra Studio when it’s announced at WWDC. I can live without the RAM for a couple of months to get a good price for it, especially since Apple don’t sell that model (with the RAM) any more.

Just out of curiosity, where do you think is the best place to sell a machine like that with the lowest risk of being scammed, while still getting the best possible price?

Wish you a speedy recovery for your back!

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#280

Post by AnthonyMouse »

wtallis wrote: post #197
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…

> 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…

> Ethernet and audio have been standard integrated onto the motherboard itself for decades

Unless the one it comes with isn't as fast as the one you want, or they didn't integrate one at all, or you need more than one.

> 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).

There is an advantage in having an empty slot because then you can put something in it.

Your SSD gets full, do you want to buy one which is twice as big and then pay twice as much and screw around transferring everything, or do you want to just add a second one? But then you need an empty slot.

You bought a machine with an iGPU and the CPU is fine but the iGPU isn't cutting it anymore. Easy to add a discrete GPU if you have somewhere to put it.

The time has come to replace your machine. Now you have to transfer your 10TB of junk once. You don't need 100Gbps ethernet 99% of the time, but using the builtin gigabit ethernet for this is more than 24 hours of waiting. A pair of 100Gbps cards cuts that >24 hours down to ~15 minutes. If the old and new machines have an empty slot.

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