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

561–570 of 672 posts

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#561

Post by kllrnohj »

Melatonic wrote: post #538
kllrnohj wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their compact solution doesn't cover all needs, they just decided that they didn't care about some of those needs. The Intel Mac Pro was the last Apple offering with high end GPU capabilities. That's now a market segment they just aren't supporting at all. They didn't figure out how to do it compactly, they just abandoned it wholesale. Similarly if your use case depends on a whole lot of fast storage (eg, the 4x NVME…

You could argue they abandoned that market long before (around the era of the mac pro trashcan). Along with the pro software.

They can abandon it multiple times ;)

When they introduced the cheese grater Mac Pro the new high end GPUs were a showcase feature of it. Complete with the bespoke "Duo" variants and the special power connector doohickey (MPX iirc?). So I'd consider that an attempt to re-enter that market at least.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#562

Post by ActorNightly »

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...

Wow spend 40k to get the same tokens/second in QWEN as you would on a 3090

I have a feeling that Mac fans obsess more about being able to run large models at unusably slow speeds instead of actually using said models for anything.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#563

Post by tracker1 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #395
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?

Where are you gonna find Apple hardware with 128GB of memory at enthusiast-compatible price? The cheapest Apple desktop with 128GB of memory shows up as costing $3499 for me, which isn't very "enthusiast-compatible", it's about 3x the minimum salary in my country!

I spent aaround that on my current personal desktop... 9950X, 2x48gb ddr5/@6000, RX 9070XT, 4tb gen 5 nvme + 4tb gen 4 nvme. I could have cut the cpu to a 9800x3d and ram to 32gb with a different GPU if my needs/usage were different. I'm running in Linux and don't game too much.

That said, a higher end gaming setup is going to cost that much and is absolutely in the enthusiast realm. "enthusiast" doesn't mean compatible with "minimum wage"

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#564

Post by brailsafe »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #270
brailsafe wrote: post #17

Pour one out for John Siracusa

But what will we do without “this doesn’t work on intel macOS” corner!?

It'll be replaced with an extended "shill arbitrary Apple product corner", iPhones r still interesting right, or should we replace our cars again!?

Although to be fair the latest two eps have been refreshingly technical

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#565

Post by tracker1 »

chirau wrote: post #527
pchristensen wrote: post #493

Earlier 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…

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 t…

It's not nothing for most people... it's more than a month of rent/mortgage for a significant number of Americans even. But if it's your primary hobby, it's not completely out of reach, and it's not something you necessarily spend every year. A lot of people will upgrade to a new computer every 3-5 years and maybe upgrade something in between those complete system upgrades.

I know plenty of people who don't make a lot of money (say top 25% or so) that will have a Boat or RV that costs more than a $3500 computer, and balk at the thought of spending that much on a computer. It just depends on where your interests are.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#566

Post by whywhywhywhy »

giwook wrote: post #407
sippeangelo wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some Chinese sources sell modded Nvidia GPUs with extra VRAM. They're quite affordable in comparison to even a Mac Pro.

And how much do you trust Chinese hardware?

The Mac is also chinese hardware

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#567

Post by whywhywhywhy »

rybosworld wrote: post #461
angoragoats wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You can certainly daisy chain several 3090's together

It's not "daisy chaining" 3090 has NVLink.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#568

Post by whywhywhywhy »

wappieslurkz wrote: post #414
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.

Do NVIDIA solutions also outperform the Apple M-series in performance per Watt?

No, that's why Apple uses Performance Per Watt not actual performance celling as the metric. In actual workloads where you'd need this power then actual performance is what matters not PPW.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#569

Post by intrasight »

mprovost wrote: post #446
embedding-shape wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you gonna find Apple hardware with 128GB of memory at enthusiast-compatible price? The cheapest Apple desktop with 128GB of memory shows up as costing $3499 for me, which isn't very "enthusiast-compatible", it's about 3x the minimum salary in my country!

The original Mac with 128KB of memory cost $2,495 when Apple released it in 1984. It would be about 3x that in today's money.

I came here to say the same. Even with my student discount price of $1000, that's over 3K in today's dollars.

We are so freaking spoiled by the cheap cost of compute now.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#570

Post by andreybaskov »

colechristensen wrote: post #526
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?

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

Sadly, memory bandwidth is abysmal compared to Apple chips - 273 GB/s vs 614 GB/s on M5 Max for similar price. Even though fp4 compute is faster, it doesn't help for all the decode heavy agentic workflows.
Post reply on HN