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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

331–340 of 672 posts

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#331
post #153

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> 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.

I also have a standing desk, and my desktop computer is still on the floor. That way I can just route all the cables to the back and then under the desk to my PC. Looks very clean as well.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#332
This would probably push some high-end audio professionals away from Logic. One of the niches Mac Pro has been popular is audio production. And with cheesegrader the ability to slot in many-many different audio interfaces into a box instead of dangling out to various PCIe enclosures has been a big win.

Here's a good video how it looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I&list=PLi2i2YhL6o... (at 1:40 Neil Parfitt shows Mac audio setup his before and after).

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#333
post #253

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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...

That is the proof what is left is a workaround, just like pilling minis on racks because Apple left the server space. Also why Swift nowadays has to have good Linux support, if app developers want to share code with the server.

A workaround that works is better than an official solution that's barely adequate. Which is often the case.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#334
post #321

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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-...

Amusingly there's a macbook next to it in the pic, is this headless?

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#335

This would probably push some high-end audio professionals away from Logic. One of the niches Mac Pro has been popular is audio production. And with cheesegrader the ability to slot in many-many different audio interfaces into a box instead of dangling out to various PCIe enclosures has been a big win. Here's a good video how it looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I&list=PLi2i2YhL6o... (at 1:40 Neil…

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#336

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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 y…

Ticketmaster is a reputation management company. Their true purpose is to take the reputation hit for charging market value for limited availability event tickets. Artists do not want to take this reputation hit themselves because it impacts their brand too much.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#337

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> 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…

My post Mortem sentiments exactly. The lack of Nvidia GPU support for the M series Mac Pro models kneecapped the platform for professionals. If Apple had included that in those they’d be the defacto professional workstation for many more folks working in AI tech.

On the other hand it forced developers to invest more in Metal which looks like an investment starting to bear fruit.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#338
post #316

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> 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 where are you going to find an Nvidia GPU with 128+ GB of memory at an enthusiast-compatible price?

That might even be true, but how large is the TAM for such machines?

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Amusingly there's a macbook next to it in the pic, is this headless?

It has a HDMI port and its USB-C ports also support display out. But I believe most who buy it intend to use it headless. The machine runs Ubuntu 24.04 and has a slightly customised Gnome (green accents and an nvidia logo in GDM) as its desktop.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Probably ebay
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