601–610 of 672 posts
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> That workstation on your desk should Under your desk, right? Right?!
I have a sit/stand desk so mine's on top, it makes organising the cables much easier. Nothing as swish looking as a Mac Pro though, it's a plain black Lian Li behemoth from the late 00s.
I have a Lian Li anniversary edition snail case and I don’t think any moveable desk could hold it.
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.
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Why should Apple have done this? It doesn’t fit their business in anyway shape or form. Where does data centre hardware sit relative to electronics / humanities cross roads that is foundational for Apple?
> Why should Apple have done this? For money, probably. Apple is presumably leaving a lot of money on the table by not trying to sell Apple Silicon for AI inference and training. They're the only ones who can attach reasonably large GPUs (M3 Ultra) to very large amounts of cheaper memory (512GB SO-DIMM per GPU). Apple could e.g. sell server SKUs of Mac Studios, heck they can sell M3 Ultra chips on PCIe cards. And the…
Still rocking a 2019 (Intel) Mac Pro here, all slots filled with various Pro Tools and UAD DSP cards, SSD, GPU, etc. I'm planning to get as much mileage out of it as I can. I'm sure a Studio would be more performant, but the Thunderbolt to PCIe chassis are not cheap.
i’m in the same boat. I bought mine back in 2021 and honestly I don’t regret my decision. It’s my main software development of music production computer plus every Sunday night I get to play counterstrike with the boys by dual booting into Windows. I’m able to service repair and upgrade it myself and one day when I’m ready to move on I’ll use it as my home server. The crazy thing is that my next upgrade will be going…
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The migration path is Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures (basically eGPU enclosures but you don't have to use a GPU).
Not only are third party GPUs not supported on apple silicon, but thunderbolt has significantly more latency and lower bandwidth than 'real' PCIe implementations, even ones with similarly cut down lanes like oculink. Apple tried before to push everything out into external PCIe enclosures and people hated it. Maybe this'll go differently this time, the Mac Studio is certainly a much more compelling offering than the t…
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A bunch of the Mac Pro decisions seem to have been more driven by "we have a warehouse of these parts" than "this is what the system needs".
A lot of Apples offerings feel a bit like that actually. To be expected when lord of the supply chain Tim Cook is running the show.
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> Is there a legit reason why they couldn't make these things upgradeable at all even on a studio machine? For the SSD, no. For the memory, yes. The memory lives on the same chip as the CPU and the GPU, it's even more tightly bound than just being soldered on. The memory being there has legitimate technical benefits that make it much easier/cheaper for them to reach the extremely high memory bandwidths that they do.
>it's even more tightly bound than just being soldered on No. There is a reason for it but no, it's just soldered on the same carrier board as the APU, in order to be really close to it. Apple could have used a form factor like CAMM2 and it would have worked the same, be it at slightly higher cost. The reason is simply to kill upgrade options and cut manufacturing costs - same as for any other soldered ram.
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I hate how I can't buy an new apple silicon with upgradeable RAM or SSD. Is there a legit reason why they couldn't make these things upgradeable at all even on a studio machine? 4TB is the smallest SSD I ever want in a new machine, but buying one from Apple is stupidly expensive. Back in the intel days, I'd buy a macbook pro, for example, with less ram and a smaller SSD than the max available and then upgrade to much…
The SSDs in the Studio are on modules, you can exchange those. They are in a custom format though.
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A workaround that works is better than an official solution that's barely adequate. Which is often the case.
Or just maybe, to use a Steve Jobs quote, one is holding it wrong and should look elsewhere.
There's also: "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."