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

521–530 of 672 posts

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#521

Post by infecto »

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…

I think most of that is really opinion and experiences. No doubt it’s not designed or built truly for racks but folks have been making rack mounts for Mac minis since they first came out.

On the upgrade path I don’t think upgrades are truly a thing these days. Aside from storage for most components by the time you get to whatever your next cycle is, it’s usually best/easiest to refresh the whole system unless you underbought the first time around.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#522

Post by BeetleB »

utopiah wrote: post #505
BeetleB wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ok. I think I misunderstood. So the idea is to simple set up the LLM service on the server and access it with an API like I would with any LLM provider? This way whatever application I want to use it for stays at home?

That's a bit more appealing. How much would it cost per month to have it continually online?

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#523

Post by oxfeed65261 »

pchristensen wrote: post #493
embedding-shape wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems I misunderstood what a "enthusiast" is, I thought it was about someone "excited about something" but seems the typical definition includes them having a lot of money too, my bad.

$3.5k is a lot of money, but not a ton by American hobby standards. It's easy to spend multiples, even orders of magnitude more than that on hobbies like fishing, wine, sports tickets, concerts, scuba, travel, being a foodie, golf, marathons, collectibles, etc. It's out of reach for lots of people, even in developed countries. But it's easily within reach for loads of people that care more about computing than other…

In June 1977, the base Apple II model with 4 KB of RAM was $1,298 (equivalent to about $6,900 in 2025), and with the maximum 48 KB of RAM it was $2,638 (equivalent to about $14,000 in 2025).

(Source: Wikipedia via Claude Opus)

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#524

Post by GeekyBear »

zozbot234 wrote: post #252
GeekyBear wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't streaming models from storage into limited memory a case where it was impressive that you could make the elephant dance at all? If you want to get usable speeds from very large models that haven't been quantitized to death on local machines, RDMA over Thunderbolt enables that use case. Consumer PC GPUs don't have enough RAM, enterprise GPUs that can handle the load very well are obscenely expensive, Strix Halo…

The bad performance you saw was with very limited memory and very large models, so streaming weights from storage was a huge bottleneck. If you gradually increase RAM, more and more of the weights are cached and the speed improves quite a bit, at least until you're running huge contexts and most of the RAM ends up being devoted to that. Is the overall speed "usable"? That's highly subjective, but with local inference…

If you don't care about performance, you have a lot of options.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#525

Post by cestith »

chocochunks wrote: post #418
cestith wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the spec sheets I’m looking at, it is not. I’m seeing models of the Dell Pro Max with 128 GB of DDR5-6400 as CAMM2, then a separate memory of up to 24 GB on the GPU. CAMM2 does not make the memory unified. There are also SO-DIMM options.

You're not looking at the right thing. Dell's naming is horrible. Dell Pro Max with GB10 ( https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/cty/pdp/spd/dell-pro-max-fcm... ). It's a very different computer than what you're looking at and has 128GB LPDDR5X unified memory.

Thanks for pointing that out. I found a more informative article about that model at https://www.mcpgov.com/dell-pro-max-gb10

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#526

Post by colechristensen »

rafram wrote: post #316
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 where are you going to find an Nvidia GPU with 128+ GB of memory at an enthusiast-compatible price?

The Nvidia DGX Spark is exactly this and in the same price and performance bracket.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#527

Post by chirau »

pchristensen wrote: post #493
embedding-shape wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems I misunderstood what a "enthusiast" is, I thought it was about someone "excited about something" but seems the typical definition includes them having a lot of money too, my bad.

$3.5k is a lot of money, but not a ton by American hobby standards. It's easy to spend multiples, even orders of magnitude more than that on hobbies like fishing, wine, sports tickets, concerts, scuba, travel, being a foodie, golf, marathons, collectibles, etc. It's out of reach for lots of people, even in developed countries. But it's easily within reach for loads of people that care more about computing than other…

I live in America, I am very well compensated. Have been for 15 years now. $3500 is a lot of money. A lot. There is a tiny bubble of us tech folks who think it is accessible to most people. It is not. It is also the same reason Macs are still a niche. Don't take your circles to be the standard, it is very very far from it, especially if you think $3500 is not a lot of money.

It is easy to confirm this, just look at the sales number of these $3500 devices. It is definitely not an enthusiast price point, even in the US.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#528

Post by nsteel »

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…

Except they don't use DDR5. LPDDR5 is always soldered. LPDDR5 requires short point-to-point connections to give you good SI at high speeds and low voltages. To get the same with DDR5 DIMMs, you'd have something physically much bigger, with way worse SI, with higher power, and with higher latency. That would be a much worse solution. GDDR is much higher power, the solution would end up bigger. Plus it's useless for system memory so now you need two memory types. LPDDR5 is the only sensible choice.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#529

Post by NikolaNovak »

embedding-shape wrote: post #415
kaashif wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is not catering to minimum salaries in poor countries. Does this really need to be explained? $3499 is definitely enthusiast compatible. That's beefy gaming PC tier, which is possibly the canonical example of an enthusiast market. This isn't tens of thousands of dollars for top tier Nvidia chips we're talking about.

Seems I misunderstood what a "enthusiast" is, I thought it was about someone "excited about something" but seems the typical definition includes them having a lot of money too, my bad.

I'm an immigrant to Canada, and yes, English has both literal meanings and colloquial meanings.

In the most literal meaning, absolutely, "Enthusiast" just means a person who likes something, is excited about something.

When it comes to market and products though, typically you'll see the word "Enthusiast" as mid-tier - something like: Consumer --> Enthusiast --> Professional (may have words like "Prosumer" in there as well etc:)

In that context, which is typically the one people will use when discussing product pricing and placement, "Enthusiast" is somebody who yes enjoys something, but does it sufficiently to be discerning and capable of purchasing mid-tier or above hardware.

So while a consumer photographer, may use their phone or compact or all-in-one camera, enthusiast photographer will probably spend $3000 - $5000 in camera gear. Equivalently, there are myriad gamers out there (on phones, consoles, Geforce Now, whatever:), an enthusiast gamer is assumed to have a dedicated gaming computer, probably a tower, with a dedicated video card, likely say a 5070ti or above, probably 32GB+ RAM, couple of SSDs which are not entry level, etc.

Again, this is not to say a person with limited budget is "not a real enthusiast", no gatekeeping is intended here; simply, if it may help, what the word means when it comes to market segmentation and product pricing :)

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#530

Post by GeekyBear »

muro wrote: post #317
GeekyBear wrote: post #49

The Ultra variants of the M series chips had previously consisted of two of the Max chips bonded together. The M5 generation Pro and Max chips have moved to a chiplet based architecture, with all the CPU cores on one chiplet, and all the GPU cores on another. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M5 So what will the M5 Ultra look like? If you integrate two CPU chiplets and two GPU chiplets, you're looking at 36 CPU co…

Or it could be the same CPU as in pro/max with more GPU chiplets.

Sure.

AI workloads would really benefit from having more RAM, GPU cores, and memory channels.

Post reply on HN