Apple discontinues the Mac Pro • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#321

Post by AdamN » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 10:44 AM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #303

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…

> But inference is unique because its performance scales with high memory throughput, and you can’t assemble that by wiring together off the shelf parts in a consumer form factor. Nvidia outperforms Mac significantly on diffusion inference and many other forms. It’s not as simple as the current Mac chips are entirely better for this.

Nvidia isn't selling one-off home computers afaik. But yes in terms of datacenter cloud usage Nvidia performs.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#322

Post by numpad0 » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 10:46 AM UTC

fooker wrote: post #292

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-...

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 devi…

I don't think it's so odd, very few products above ~$50k have final prices listed for anyone to buy 1-click.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#323

Post by chocochunks » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 10:49 AM UTC

chpatrick wrote: post #319

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But inference is unique because its performance scales with high memory throughput, and you can’t assemble that by wiring together off the shelf parts in a consumer form factor. Nvidia outperforms Mac significantly on diffusion inference and many other forms. It’s not as simple as the current Mac chips are entirely better for this.

But they're pretty fast and can have loads of RAM, which would be prohibitively expensive with Nvidia.

A 128GB 2TB Dell Pro Max with Nvidia GB10 is about $4200, a Mac Studio with 128GB RAM and 2TB storage is $4100. So pretty comparable. I think Dell's pricing has been rocked more by the RAM shortage too.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#324

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC

rubyn00bie wrote: post #190

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 com…

[deleted]

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#325

Post by newsclues » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 11:02 AM UTC

AdamN wrote: post #321

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But inference is unique because its performance scales with high memory throughput, and you can’t assemble that by wiring together off the shelf parts in a consumer form factor. Nvidia outperforms Mac significantly on diffusion inference and many other forms. It’s not as simple as the current Mac chips are entirely better for this.

Nvidia isn't selling one-off home computers afaik. But yes in terms of datacenter cloud usage Nvidia performs.

https://marketplace.nvidia.com/en-us/enterprise/personal-ai-...

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#326

Post by rl3 » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 11:03 AM UTC

eigenspace wrote: post #285

hermanzegerman wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Framework offers the AI Ryzen Max with ̶1̶9̶6̶G̶B̶ 128GB of unified RAM for 2,699$ That's a pretty good deal I would think https://frame.work/de/de/products/desktop-diy-amd-aimax300/c...

The framework desktop is quite cool, but those Ryzen Max CPUs are still a pretty poor competitor to Apple's chips if what you care about it running an LLM. Ryzen Max tops out at 256 GB/s of memory bandwidth, whereas an M4 Max can hit 560 GB/s of bandwidth. So even if the model fits in the memory buffer on the Ryzen Max, you're still going to hit something like half the tokens/second just because the GPU will be sitti…

There's also the DGX Spark. Granted, its price has been going up recently alongside everything else that has memory in it.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#327

Post by matja » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 11:16 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #51

magic_hamster wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The top Mac Studio has six thunderbolt 5 ports, each of which is a PCIe 4.0 x4 link. Each is a 8GB/sec link in each direction, which is a lot. Going from x16 down to x4 has less than a 10% hit on games: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/sbegpb/gpu_in_pci...

Yeah 80GB/s total I/O bandwidth is a lot for a Mac, but desktop PCs have been doing 1TB/s (128x PCIe5) for years (Threadripper etc).

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#328

Post by eigenspace » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 11:16 AM UTC

rl3 wrote: post #326

eigenspace wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The framework desktop is quite cool, but those Ryzen Max CPUs are still a pretty poor competitor to Apple's chips if what you care about it running an LLM. Ryzen Max tops out at 256 GB/s of memory bandwidth, whereas an M4 Max can hit 560 GB/s of bandwidth. So even if the model fits in the memory buffer on the Ryzen Max, you're still going to hit something like half the tokens/second just because the GPU will be sitti…

There's also the DGX Spark. Granted, its price has been going up recently alongside everything else that has memory in it.

I haven't heard a single good think about DGX Spark from anyone using it, so I'd be pretty wary about that.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#329

Post by xienze » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 11:22 AM UTC

rl3 wrote: post #326

eigenspace wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The framework desktop is quite cool, but those Ryzen Max CPUs are still a pretty poor competitor to Apple's chips if what you care about it running an LLM. Ryzen Max tops out at 256 GB/s of memory bandwidth, whereas an M4 Max can hit 560 GB/s of bandwidth. So even if the model fits in the memory buffer on the Ryzen Max, you're still going to hit something like half the tokens/second just because the GPU will be sitti…

There's also the DGX Spark. Granted, its price has been going up recently alongside everything else that has memory in it.

That also has pretty poor memory bandwidth. 283GB/s I think.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#330

Post by chatmasta » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 11:23 AM UTC

fooker wrote: post #292

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-...

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 devi…

Nvidia doesn’t list prices because they don’t sell the machines themselves. If you click through each of those links, the prices are listed on the distributor’s website. For example the Dell Pro Max with GB10 is $4,194.34 and you can even click “Add to Cart.”