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

291–300 of 672 posts

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#291

Post by pjmlp »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #266
pjmlp wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one cares about Metal in that space, plus CUDA already has unified memory for a while. https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-programming-guide/04-speci... Can we also stop giving Apple some prize for unified memory? It was the way of doing graphics programming on home computers, consoles and arcades, before dedicated 3D cards became a thing on PC and UNIX workstations.

Can we please stop treating this like some 2000s Mac vs PC flame war where you feel the need go full whataboutism whenever anyone acknowledges any positive attribute of any Apple product? If you actually read back over the comments you’re replying to, you’ll see that you’re not actually correcting anything that anyone actually said. This shit is so tiring.

You mean like the Neo marketing materials put out by Apple?

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#292

Post by fooker »

robotswantdata wrote: post #228
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…

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

It's hilarious that not a single one of these has pricing listed anywhere public.

I don't think they expect anyone to actually buy these.

Most companies looking to buy these for developers would ideally have multiple people share one machine and that sort of an arrangement works much more naturally with a managed cloud machine instead of the tower format presented here.

Confirming my hypothesis, this category of devices more or less absent in the used market. The only DGX workstation on ebay has a GPU from 2017, several generations ago.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#293

Post by eigenspace »

tylerflick wrote: post #55
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 Thunderbolt is external PCIe.

No, oculink is external PCIe.

Thunderbolt can kinda-sorta mimic PCIe, but it needs to chop up the PCIe signal into smaller packets, transmit them and then put them back together and this introduces a big jump in latency, even when bandwidth can be rather high.

For many applications this isn't a big deal, but for others it causes major problems (gaming being the big one, but really anything that's latency sensitive is going to suffer a lot).

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#294

Post by alifeinbinary »

lukeh wrote: post #112

Still rocking a 2019 (Intel) Mac Pro here, all slots filled with various Pro Tools and UAD DSP cards, SSD, GPU, etc. I'm planning to get as much mileage out of it as I can. I'm sure a Studio would be more performant, but the Thunderbolt to PCIe chassis are not cheap.

i’m in the same boat. I bought mine back in 2021 and honestly I don’t regret my decision. It’s my main software development of music production computer plus every Sunday night I get to play counterstrike with the boys by dual booting into Windows. I’m able to service repair and upgrade it myself and one day when I’m ready to move on I’ll use it as my home server. The crazy thing is that my next upgrade will be going back to a MacBook Pro most likely because the thunderbolt connectivity will be able to handle the Blackmagic 4 camera broadcast capture card and NVME PCIe storage card that are in my Mac Pro right now through some external enclosure.

The only real drawback that I’ve experienced with the Mac Pro has been the lack of support for large language models on the AMD GPU due to Apple's lacklustre metal drivers but I’ve been working with a couple of other developers to port a MoltenVK translation layer to Ollama that enables LLM’s on the GPU. We’re trying to get it on the main branch since testing has gone well.

One thing a lot of commenters in this thread are overlooking is that this is the death nell for repairable and upgradable computing for Mac, which is super disappointing.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#296

Post by eigenspace »

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.

The memory does *not* live on the same chip as the CPU and GPU, you appear to be thinking of HBM. Apple is using regular LPDDR5 RAM on separate chips, but soldered near to the CPU/GPU.

The soldering does serve a purpose though, the shorter traces allow for better signal integrity at higher speeds. This isn't something special about what Apple is doing though, Intel and AMD are doing the exact same thing with the exact same LPDDR5 chips on their respective APUs.

HBM is still almost purely reserved for datacentre GPUs.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#297

Post by petepete »

moogly wrote: post #153
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…

> That workstation on your desk should Under your desk, right? Right?!

I have a sit/stand desk so mine's on top, it makes organising the cables much easier.

Nothing as swish looking as a Mac Pro though, it's a plain black Lian Li behemoth from the late 00s.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#298

Post by shevy-java »

> It has gone without an update since then, languishing at its $6,999 price point

What I find fascinating is how people pay so much for Apple-related products. Perhaps the quality requires a premium (I don't share that opinion, but for the sake of thinking, let's have it as an option here), but this seems more deliberate milking by Apple with such price tags. People must love being milked it seems.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#299

Post by eigenspace »

wmf wrote: post #36
al_borland wrote: post #2

They've been trying to kill the Mac Pro for over a decade. I wonder how long before they backtrack again? It seems like they should at least have a migration path for users who needed the expansion cards the Mac Pro supported. Pushing them to the PC seems pretty bad. Apple's new "Pro" definition seems more like "Prosumer".

The migration path is Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures (basically eGPU enclosures but you don't have to use a GPU).

Not only are third party GPUs not supported on apple silicon, but thunderbolt has significantly more latency and lower bandwidth than 'real' PCIe implementations, even ones with similarly cut down lanes like oculink.

Apple tried before to push everything out into external PCIe enclosures and people hated it. Maybe this'll go differently this time, the Mac Studio is certainly a much more compelling offering than the trashcan Mac Pro. But I think this is still a shitty and painful situation for a lot of specific users.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#300

Post by gehsty »

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.

If my Grandma had wheels she would be a bicycle. Apple would need to transition from being a consumer electronics company to being a B2B retailer for data centre hardware to take advantage of this.

Obviously Siri from WWDC 2yrs ago was a disaster for Apple. Other than that they seem to have done pretty well navigating the new LLM world. I do think they would benefit from having their own SOA LLM, but I don’t think its is necessary for them. My mental model for LLMs and Apple is that they are similar Garage Band - “Now everyone can play an instrument” becomes “now anyone can make an app”. Apple owns the interface to the user (i don’t see anyone making nicer to use consumer hardware) and can use what ever stack in the background to deliver the technical features they decide to.

Post reply on HN