The Mac Pro would have been much more popular if MacOS was still compatible with Nvidia GPUs.
Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Well it depends entirely on what you need. You can even do the training yourself on that infrastructure to rent if you want. The more you do yourself, the more private but also the more expensive it will be. I don't want to make an ad here but I'm going to point to HuggingFace https://endpoints.huggingface.co (and to avoid singling them out just https://replicate.com/pricing too but I don't know them well) as an exam…
Well, full disclosure (despite my comments above): I'm not interested in buying a Mac Studio. I was merely explaining why I thought people may prefer it.
For my own use, I'm just looking at absolute price (and convenience).
I haven't explored open weights models, so I have no idea which I'd want. It would be great to get a "frontier" model like Minimax-M2.5, but at $10/hr, it's not worth it - let alone $40/hr for GLM-5. I'd have to explore use cases for cheaper models. Likely for things related to reading emails, I can get by with a much cheaper model.
If I set one of these up, how easily is it for me to launch one of these (on the command line on my home PC) and then shut it down. Right now, when I write any app (or use OpenCode), it's frictionless. My worry is that either turning it on will be a hassle, and even worse, I'll forget to turn it off and suddenly get a big pointless bill.
If there are any guides out there on how people manage all this, it would be much appreciated.
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t mistake stock market performance for revenue. NVIDIA makes ~200B annually, same as what Apple makes from iPhones. It’s a big market but GPUs aren’t just AI.
I'm purely talking in terms of revenue. There's a huge demand for AI systems from personal workstations to datacenter servers, and Apple was one of the few companies in the world in a position to build complete systems for it. But for some reason Apple thought the sound recording engineer or the video editor market was more important... like, WTF dude? Have some vision at least!
Apple abandoned the pro video editor market many years ago with the trashcan mac pro - theyre "prosumer" only at best.
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#544I 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…
> with Apple devices you are forced to use macOS that kind of sucks, especially for a server usage
you can just install linux?
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#545The 2019 Mac Pro’s main purpose was to provide much needed reassurance that Apple cared about the Mac. In prior years the quality of the Macs had fallen over all product lines. And the question of does Apple care about the Mac at all was a legitimate one. This Mac Pro was about resetting and giving a clear signal that Apple was willing to invest in the Mac far more than it was about ‘slots’. Today, Mac hardware is th…
The hardware teams have done a great job proving Apple cares about the Mac.
It'd be nice if the people in charge of the software would get the message.
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
Agreed. Unless you have full control over the production chain to fully produce a device, you are subject to the whims and desires of those who preside over such technological feats that we take for granted in our daily lives.
To the original point, it's safe to say that highlighting a nationality with regards to trust is baseless and without merit, as would be for any other topic (men/women from x are y, z food is better here, etc..). Real life is much more complicated and nuanced past nationalities. Some might call it FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) but there's always a deeper rationale at the individual level as well.
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
$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)
Wow, 48k for $14000. Now you can get a MBP with a million times more memory for $3500 or so. Whereas that CPU was clocked at 1 MHz, so CPUs are only several thousand times faster, maybe something like 30,000 times faster if you can make use of multi-core.
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
But where are you going to find an Nvidia GPU with 128+ GB of memory at an enthusiast-compatible price?
You don’t need it if you use llamacpp on Windows, or if you compile it on Linux with CUDA 13 and the correct kernel HMM support, and you’re only using MoE models (which, tbh, you should be doing anyways).
What MoE has to do with it? Aside from Flash-MoE that supports exactly one model and only on macOs - you still need to load entire model into memory. You also don't know what experts going to be activated, so it's not like you can predict which needs to be loaded.
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#549While the trash can generation was somewhat present and around, I don't think I ever saw a cheese grater in the flesh. Did it have any users? Were there any actual useful expansion cards? Did anybody continue buying this at all, after it didn't get the M3 Ultra bump, that the Mac Studio got last year?
The cheese grater mac pros were very popular, in that people got them and continued to use them. The most notable feature was that there were mac-specific graphics cards, and you could also run PC graphics cards (without a nice boot screen). They had a 1.4kw power supply I believe, and there was extra pcie power for higher-end graphics cards. You could upgrade the memory, add up to 6 or more sata hard disks (2 in dvd…
> nowadays an apple computer is more like an iphone - apple would prefer if everything was welded shut.
Funny timing to say that
https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-r...
Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
#550Earlier quoted context omitted.
1200$ as the minimum salary covers probably 70% of Europe by population?
The Neo has enough power to do small LLM testing and pretty much anything else a bit slowly, and costs $600?
Neo tops at 8GB RAM. What LLM are you going to run there? Functiongemma?
It can absolutely do some ML inference on it, but not much in terms of LLMs.