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

501–510 of 672 posts

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#501

Post by badc0ffee »

pjmlp wrote: post #244
badc0ffee wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly beefier than a Mini - 6 TB5 ports (which can drive 6 PCIe 5.0 x4 slots in an enclosure if you want), M3 Ultra, up to 256GB RAM.

The detail you are missing is that one has to buy an additional enclosure and the set of PCI cards is actually limited, hardly workstation class. This is a workstation, https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/precision-...

Damn, that Dell case, fancy Xeon processor and nVidia card must really be worth a lot, because the rest of what you get for $9k is 32 GB RAM, a 512 GB SSD, and a Windows 11 Pro license, all while consuming hundreds of watts of power.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#502

Post by ProllyInfamous »

Marsymars wrote: post #158
ProllyInfamous wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a former 4,1 user, myself — replaced with an M2Pro mini Jan 2023 (finally retired fully 2025). Absolutely recommend you purchase the 4-bay Terramaster external enclosure — gives you four SATA slots that are hot-swappable (unlike MacPro's). 10gbps via USB-C.

Are SMART attributes independently readable on that? (Or any multi-drive USB-C enclosures?)

>or any USB-C enclosure

SMART is supported on my external Acasis nVME.

----

I have two TerraMaster sledbads; this one [typing] is years older [only 5gbps, macOS Ventura] and shows `SMART: not supported` [1]

[1] It's mirrored WD_blacks (RAID1) so I have at least some redundancy... I know: a RAID does NOT count as "backed-up".

----

Within an hour I'll have checked the newer system (I suspect it'll be similar — definitely faster!).

#TodayIlearnt

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#503

Post by dghlsakjg »

bigyabai wrote: post #488
mjburgess wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Upgrades" havent been a thing for nearly a decade. By the time you want to upgrade a machine part (c. 5yr+ for modern machines), you'd want to upgrade every thing, and its cheap to do so. It isnt 2005 any more where RAM/CPU/etc. progress benefits from upgrading every 6mo. It's closer to 6yr to really notice

That's news to me. I see Mac Minis with external drives plugged-in constantly; I bet those people would appreciate user-servicable storage. I doubt they bought an external drive because they wanted to throw away the whole computer.

Mac minis have user serviceable storage: https://store.m4-ssd.com/products/third-party-ssd-for-mac-mi...

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#504

Post by caycep »

alerighi wrote: post #481
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…

To me there is a fundamental difference. Even if PC hardware costs slightly more (now because of the RAM situation, Apple producing his chips in house can get better deals of course), it's something that is worth more investing in in. Maybe you spend 1000$ more for a PC of comparable performance, well tomorrow you need more power, change or add another GPU, add more RAM, add another SSD. A workstation you can keep up…

>>Mac suck even hardware side form a server point of view, for example it's not possible to rack mount them, it's not possible to have redundant PSU, key don't offer remote KVM capability, etc.

https://atp.fm/683

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#505

Post by utopiah »

BeetleB wrote: post #470
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…

> 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 soun…

> suddenly jack up the rates or go out of business?

There is basically no lock-in, you don't even "move" your image, your data is basically some "context" or a history of prompts which probably fits in a floppy disk (not even being sarcastic) so if you know the basic about containerization (Docker, podman, etc) which most likely the cloud provider even takes care of, then it takes literally minutes to switch from one to another. It's really not more complex that setting up a PHP server, the only difference is the hardware you run on and that's basically a dropdown button on a Web interface (if you don't want to have scripts for that too) then selecting the right image (basically NVIDIA support).

Consequently even if that were to happen (which I have NEVER seen! at worst it's like 15% increase after years) then it would actually not matter to you. It's also very unlikely to happen based of the investment poured into the "industry". Basically everybody is trying to get "you" as a customer to rely on their stack.

... but OK, let's imagine that's not appealing to you, have you not done the comparison of what a Mac Studio (or whatever hardware) could actually buy otherwise?

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#506

Post by traceroute66 »

bigyabai wrote: post #483
dabockster wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This needs to be sold as the big ticket item for low level devs. Their chips are some of the most power efficient chips on the market right now. Hoping they release a blade server version somehow.

Nvidia's recent GPUs are more power-efficient than Apple Silicon in raster, training and inference workloads. A blade server would get cancelled just like the Mac Pro for exactly the same reasons: https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-rep...

> Nvidia's recent GPUs are more power-efficient than Apple Silicon in raster, training and inference workloads.

I think you can do better than the proverbial Apples and Oranges comparison.

In terms of total system, "box on desk", Apple is likely to remain the performance per watt leader compared to random PC workstations with whatever GPUs you put inside.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#507

Post by lowbloodsugar »

angoragoats wrote: post #479
rybosworld wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. This setup will work for 100B models as well. And yes, the Mac will draw less power, but the Nvidia machine will be many times faster. So depending on your specific Mac and your specific Nvidia setup, the performance per watt will be in the same ballpark. And higher absolu…

How much does it cost to have an electrician wire up 240v circuit just to power the thing?

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#508

Post by sgc »

x______________ wrote: post #412
giwook wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how much do you trust Chinese hardware?

When there's no one left to trust, maybe you need to re-evaluate your criteria.

I wouldn't say that's true or even likely. It's completely possible to be in a pit of vipers where every single snake is venomous, and that is pretty much what we are seeing: With technological advances, there is a certain subset of people that will use them primarily to solidify their power and control over others. There is no utopian society right now whose government doesn't look to spy through technology, which of course is best set up at time of manufacture.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#509

Post by bombcar »

looopTools wrote: post #226

This honestly saddens me a little. From the PowerMac's to the MacPro I always loved them when having the opportunity to work with them. Plus I loved the expandability they offered. I don't find the external GPU houses for Mac Studio as appealing to use.

They were a great aspirational product in the "when I win the lottery" category.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#510

Post by rybosworld »

angoragoats wrote: post #479
rybosworld wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. This setup will work for 100B models as well. And yes, the Mac will draw less power, but the Nvidia machine will be many times faster. So depending on your specific Mac and your specific Nvidia setup, the performance per watt will be in the same ballpark. And higher absolu…

I think it's bad form to say "citation needed" when your original claim didn't include citations.

Regardless - there's a difference between training and inference. And pytorch doesn't magically make 5 gpus behave like 1 gpu.

Post reply on HN