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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#351

Post by AdamN »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #72
vlovich123 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people talk about 100gigabit networks for Macs, im really curious what kind of network you run at home and how much money you spent on it. Even at work I’m generally seeing 10gigabit network ports with 100gigabit+ only in data centers where macs don’t have a presence

I work in media production and I have the same thought constantly. Hell I curse in church as far as my industry is concerned because I find 2.5 to be fine for most of us. 10 absolutely.

100gbps is going to be for mesh networks supporting clusters (4 Mac Studios let's just say) - not for LAN type networks (unless it's in an actual datacenter).

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#352

Post by _ph_ »

steve-atx-7600 wrote: post #154
musicale wrote: post #123

I feel like Apple is going back to the days of toaster "appliance" Macs. No slots, no upgrades, just buy a new one in 3-7 years.

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…

The SSDs in the Studio are on modules, you can exchange those. They are in a custom format though.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#353

Post by midnight_eclair »

chocochunks wrote: post #323
chpatrick wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

~not unified memory tho~

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#354

Post by Orygin »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #280
wtallis wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My motherboard has 3 16x PCIe slots, but realistically only one is used for the GPU as the other two are under the mastodon of a cooler needed by the GPU. Can't use a 100G network card if I can't fit it under the GPU. Can't not use the GPU as I don't have an iGPU in my CPU.

He's not advocating from removing PCIe slots, but in practice, it's needed by way less consumers than before. There's probably more computers being sold right now without any PCIe slot than there are with more than 1.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#355

Post by mciancia »

midnight_eclair wrote: post #353
chocochunks wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

~not unified memory tho~

It is unified memory on this one

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#356

Post by mixdup »

HerbManic wrote: post #173
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…

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...

The proposition of a Mac Pro in the Apple Silicon world wasn't necessarily about performance, it was about the existence of the PCIe slots. I don't think AI becoming a workload for pro Macs means the Mac Pro doesn't have a place, people who were using Mac Pros for audio or video capture didn't stop doing that media work and switched to AI as a profession. That market just wasn't big enough to sustain the Mac Pro in the first place and Apple has finally acknowledged that fact

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#357

Post by bombcar »

philistine wrote: post #345
sgerenser wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess not enough people bought the shirt: https://cottonbureau.com/p/4RUVDA/shirt/mac-pro-believe-dark...

Or too many people bought the shirt instead of a Mac Pro.

The shirt was a bit cheaper. And probably a bit faster processing, too.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#358

Post by stephen_g »

I never understood the point of the Mac Pro for the last decade or so - especially after the Mac Studio was released, Apple should have worked out what professionals actually want - basically a Mac Studio but with three or four PCIe slots and a few SSD slots. That’s literally all it should be!

The Mac Pro was at the same time bizarrely over the top while also weirdly limited in some ways - while also being way to expensive…

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#359

Post by grahamlee »

mixdup wrote: post #356
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...

The proposition of a Mac Pro in the Apple Silicon world wasn't necessarily about performance, it was about the existence of the PCIe slots. I don't think AI becoming a workload for pro Macs means the Mac Pro doesn't have a place, people who were using Mac Pros for audio or video capture didn't stop doing that media work and switched to AI as a profession. That market just wasn't big enough to sustain the Mac Pro in t…

so many peripherals now come in external boxes that communicate _incredibly quickly_ over Thunderbolt 4/5 that the need for PCIe is marginal, while the cost to support it is significant.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#360

Post by bombcar »

waz0wski wrote: post #27
w-m wrote: post #6

While the trash can generation was somewhat present and around, I don't think I ever saw a cheese grater in the flesh. Did it have any users? Were there any actual useful expansion cards? Did anybody continue buying this at all, after it didn't get the M3 Ultra bump, that the Mac Studio got last year?

I just replaced a 2009 MacPro It had many hardware upgrades over the years - upgraded CPUs, 128GB RAM, 4TB NVME storage, a modern AMD GPU, USB3/c, thunderbolt, etc The only reason it got replaced is because it became too much of a PITA to keep modern OSX running on it (via OCLP) Replaced with an M4 Max Mac Studio, which is a nice and faster machine but with no ability to upgrade anything and much worse hardware resal…

At the price of the Mac Pro you could buy two Mac Studios (at least) - one today and one three or more years in the future.
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