Apple discontinues the Mac Pro • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#461

Post by rybosworld » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

angoragoats wrote: post #445

rafram wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can still buy used 3090 cards on ebay. 5 of them will give you 120GB of memory and will blow away any mac in terms of performance on LLM workloads. They have gone up in price lately and are now about $1100 each, but at one point they were $700-800 each.

I don't see how 5x 3090's is a better option than an M3 Ultra Mac studio.

The mac will just work for models as large as 100B, can go higher with quantized models. And power draw will be 1/5th as much as the 3090 setup.

You can certainly daisy chain several 3090's together but it doesn't work seamlessly.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#462

Post by adgjlsfhk1 » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

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.

Unfortunately the GB10 is incredibly bandwith starved. You get 128gb ram, but only 270GB/s bandwidth. The M3 Ultra mac studio gets you 820GB/s. (The M4 max is at 410GB/s. I'm not aware of any workload that gets the GB10 to it's theoretical peakflops.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#463

Post by justinhj » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

pwython wrote: post #454

utopiah wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. I really don't get why anybody would want that. What's the use case there? If someone doesn't care about privacy, they can use for-profit services because they are basically losing money, trying to corner the market. If they care about privacy, they can rent cloud instances in order to setup, run, close and it will be both cheaper, faster (if they can affo…

Genuine question: If I were to fine-tune a model with 10 years of business data in a competitive space, would you feel safe with cloud training?

People store that data in databases in the same data centre so it's really the same level of trust needed that your provider adheres to the no training on your data. Trust and lawyers.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#464

Post by NetMageSCW » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:58 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #263

rubyn00bie wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> A huge reason for this is Apple needs unified memory to keep their money maker (laptops) profitable and performant None of the things people care about really get much out of "unified memory". GPUs need a lot of memory bandwidth, but CPUs generally don't and it's rare to find something which is memory bandwidth bound on a CPU that doesn't run better on a GPU to begin with. Not having to copy data between the CPU an…

>The sad part is that DDR5 is the thing that doesn't need to be soldered, unlike GDDR. But then Apple solders it anyway.

Apple needs to solder it because they are attaching it directly to the SOC to minimize lead length and that is part of how they are able to get that bandwidth.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#465

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #201

kube-system wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like Apple soldered some plain old DDR5 to a PCB to be difficult: 1. It's TSMC's InFO_POP, which has significant performance benefits. 2. There weren't even any modules that existed for LPDDR until very recently. (and while the A18 was being designed, it didn't exist) 3. The power/price/performance/thermals they are able to achieve with this configuration is not possible with socketed RAM. You are asking the…

The "Mac memory is special" shtick is getting old. macOS is a heavy OS, 8gb is an objective liability to the SSD lifespan.

[deleted]

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#466

Post by mitjam » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

DeathArrow wrote: post #247

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…

Still, running 2 to 4 5090 will beat anything Apple has to offer for both inference and training.

I would say 1-2 RTX 6000 Pro maxQ are more practical.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#467

Post by NetMageSCW » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #233

moogly wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I mean... if you spent $7,000 on it, do you really want to hide it away under the desk?

That’s why my Lian Li anniversary edition is next to my desk. Also because it is nearly as tall and wouldn’t fit under it.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#468

Post by dabockster » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 3:07 PM UTC

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…

CUDA 13 on Linux solves the unified memory problem via HMM and llamacpp. It’s an absolute pain to get running without disabling Secure Boot, but that should be remedied literally next month with the release of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Canonical is incorporating signed versions of both the new Nvidia open driver and CUDA into its own repo system, so look out for that. Signed Nvidia modules do already exist right now for RHEL and AlmaLinux, but those aren’t exactly the best desktop OSes.

But yeah, right now Apple actually has price performance captured a lot of you’re buying a new computer just in general.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#469

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 3:07 PM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #201

kube-system wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like Apple soldered some plain old DDR5 to a PCB to be difficult: 1. It's TSMC's InFO_POP, which has significant performance benefits. 2. There weren't even any modules that existed for LPDDR until very recently. (and while the A18 was being designed, it didn't exist) 3. The power/price/performance/thermals they are able to achieve with this configuration is not possible with socketed RAM. You are asking the…

The "Mac memory is special" shtick is getting old. macOS is a heavy OS, 8gb is an objective liability to the SSD lifespan.

[deleted]

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#470

Post by BeetleB » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 3:08 PM UTC

utopiah wrote: post #448

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…

> ...making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. I really don't get why anybody would want that. What's the use case there? If someone doesn't care about privacy, they can use for-profit services because they are basically losing money, trying to corner the market. If they care about privacy, they can rent cloud instances in order to setup, run, close and it will be both cheaper, faster (if they can affo…

> If they care about privacy, they can rent cloud instances in order to setup, run, close and it will be both cheaper, faster (if they can afford it) but also with no upfront cost per project. This can be done with a lot of scaffolding, e.g. Mistral, HuggingFace, or not, e.g. AWS/Azure/GoogleCloud, etc.

I'm a somewhat tech heavy guy (compiles my own kernel, uses online hosting, etc).

Reading your comment doesn't sound appealing at all. I do almost no cloud stuff. I don't know which provider to choose. I have to compare costs. How can I trust they won't peek at my data (no, a Privacy Policy is not enough - I'd need encryption with only me having the key). What do I do if they suddenly jack up the rates or go out of business? I suddenly need a backup strategy as well. And repeat the whole painful loop.

I'll lose a lot more time figuring this out than with a Mac Studio. I'll probably lose money too. I'll rent from one provider, get stuck, and having a busy life, sit on it a month or two before I find a fix (paying money for nothing). At least if I use the Mac Studio as my primary machine, I don't have to worry about money going to waste because I'm actually utilizing it.

And chances are, a lot of the data I'll use it with (e.g. mail) is sitting on the same machine anyway. Getting something on the cloud to work with it is yet-another-pain.