Apple discontinues the Mac Pro • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#551

Post by 0x457 » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #404

joe_mamba wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's about 3x the minimum salary in my country! Enthusiast compute hardware doesn't cater to the people on the minimum salary in any country, let alone developing nations. When Ferrari makes a car they don't ask themselves if people on minimum salary will be able to afford them. In in the bottom two poorest EU member states and Apple and Microsoft Xbox don't even bother to have a direct to customer store presence h…

Right, I think maybe we're then talking about "upper class enthusiasts" or something in reality then? I understood that to juts be about the person, not what economic class they were in, maybe I misunderstood.

enthusiasts in computer hardware assumes enthusiasm about hardware, not about "hardware on an budget". It doesn't matter if it's afforable or not.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#552

Post by heraldgeezer » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #487

alerighi wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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

You can keep CPU and RAM for way longer than the GPU if you game...

Your point kind of disproves your point.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#553

Post by FireBeyond » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:18 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…

I do love the Mac Studio. I had a 2019 Mac Pro, the Intel cheesegrater, but my home office upstairs became unpleasant with it pushing out 300W+. I replaced it with the M2 Ultra Studio for a fraction of the heat output (though I did had to buy an OWC 4xNVMe bay).

> 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.

This I'm not actually as sure about. The current Studio offerings have done away with the 512GB memory option. I understand the RAM situation, but they didn't change pricing they just discontinued it. So I'm curious to see what the next Studio is like. I'd almost love to see a Studio with even one PCI slot, make it a bit taller, have a slide out cover...

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#554

Post by brailsafe » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

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'd argue that some of those are more consumption and activity than hobby depending on how they're engaged with, and that people use the word "hobby" too loosely, but would agree that Americans in-particular consume at obscene rates.

Golf equipment, mountaineering equipment, skiing and snowboarding lift tickets and gear, a single excessive graphics card that's only used for increasing frame rates marginally, or basically a single extra feature on a car, are all things that accumulate quite quickly. Some are clearly more superfluous than others and cater to whales, while some are just expensive by nature and aren't attempting to be anything else

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#555

Post by 1123581321 » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

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 a midrange to upper expense in the US if it’s your hobby. Most people don’t have a serious computer hobby but they golf, trade ATVs, travel, drink, etc.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#556

Post by sgc » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

x______________ wrote: post #546

sgc wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Rather than people being wary of Chinese in general, it's more that there is a high degree of government control exercised in China and they are known to be very strategic with long-term planning in regards to technology control both for spying and actual remote control of devices. We are all just looking for the least bad option. It's not like devices from other countries are immune, but they are often less organized so there is a better chance of avoiding the Chinese level of planned access.

It does seem like pretty low risk in this specific case so I agree OP's comment was bit over the top, but I would have no way to make anything resembling even an educated guess as to how far their programs go.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#557

Post by noboostforyou » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

nextaccountic wrote: post #433

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.

Any links to them? Never heard of this..

I've seen a guy who sells modded 2080 Ti with 22gb for $500

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/chinese-work...

There's also unreleased Nvidia engineering samples of cards with doubled VRAM like this - https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/1rczghu/update_unre...

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#558

Post by utopiah » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #542

utopiah wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honestly I doubt it's worth it, hence my suggestion to make a "cold" estimation of both options.

Well it's not exactly a guide and honestly it's quite outdated (because I stop keeping track as I just don't get the quality of results I hope for versus huge trade offs that aren't worth it for me) but I listed plenty of models and software solutions for self-hosting, at home or in the cloud at https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntel...

Feels free to check it out and if there is something I can clarify, happy to try.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#559

Post by huslage » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

readitalready wrote: post #59

Apple really dropped the ball here. They had every ability to make something competitive with Nvidia for AI training as well as inference, by selling high end multi GPU Mac Pro workstations as well as servers, but for some reason chose not to. They had the infrastructure and custom SoCs and everything. What a waste. It really could have been a bigger market for them than even the iPhone.

Apple makes AI inference and training servers by the thousands. They just don't sell them to anyone. They use them internally in their datacenters. They didn't drop the ball, they are playing a different game while not cannibalizing their existing customer base.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#560

Post by brailsafe » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

NikolaNovak wrote: post #529

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.

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 a…

Additionally, "enthusiasts"/"hobbyists" tend to be willing to spend beyond practical utility, while professionals are more interested in pragmatism, especially in photography from what I can tell.

If you're an actual pro, you need your stuff to work properly, efficiently, reliably, when it's called for. When you're a hobbyist, it's sometimes almost the goal to waste money and time on stuff that really doesn't matter beyond your interest in it; working on the thing is the point, not the value it generates. Pros should spend money on good tools and research and knowledge, but it usually needs to be an investment, sometimes crossing over with hobbyist opinions.

A friend of mine who's a computer hobbyist and retail IT tech, making far far less than I do, spends comically more than me on hardware to play basically one game. He keeps up to date with the latest processors and all that stuff, he knows hardware in terms of gaming. I meanwhile—despite having more money available—have a fairly budget gaming PC that I did build myself, but contains entirely old/used components, some of which he just needed to get rid of and gave me for free, and I upgrade my main mac every 5 years or something. I only upgrade when hardware is really getting in my way.