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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#631

Post by fooker »

tecleandor wrote: post #420
fooker wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean the small GB10s. If you try to find the pricing of the GB300 towers even on the manufacturer sites, you'll see that it's not listed for any of the six or so models.

Because that's a different price point, that's getting near 100K, and the availability is very limited. I don't think they're even selling it openly, just to a bunch of partners... The MSI workstation is the one that is showing some pricing around. Seems like some distributors are quoting USD96K, and have a wait time of 4 to 6 weeks [0]. Other say 90K and also out of stock [1] -- 0: https://www.cdw.com/product/msi-nv…

> I don't think they're even selling it openly, just to a bunch of partners...

Yes, that's my point.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#632

Post by musicale »

steve-atx-7600 wrote: post #160
musicale wrote: post #123

I feel like Apple is going back to the days of toaster "appliance" Macs. No slots, no upgrades, just buy a new one in 3-7 years.

Even the toaster appliance Mac’s had upgradeable ram and hard drives though. But it does seem like that to me also.

Burrell Smith managed to sneak a memory upgrade capability into the original Mac.

> But once again, Steve Jobs objected...

> He just left it in there and no one bothered to mention it to Steve

https://www.folklore.org/Diagnostic_Port.html

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#633

Post by AnthonyMouse »

chongli wrote: post #622
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why it's quite appropriate for their reputation to be absolute shit and for members of the public to make sure the stink spreads to anyone who chooses to do business with them as a disincentive to doing it.

Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation which owns at least 338 major concert venues [1]. Their market power in the venue business allows them to force artists to use Ticketmaster for ticket sales. The artists don't mind though, as they can tell their fans they have no other choice but to use Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster absorbs all of the reputational stink and the artists likely earn more money than they otherwise would…

Except that they don't absorb all of the reputational stink because "Live Nation owns at least 338 major concert venues" is clearly a BS excuse when there are more than 10,000 concert venues in the US, and then the fans still blame the artists for using Ticketmaster.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#634

Post by darkwater »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #444
darkwater wrote: post #436

Earlier 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?

Maybe, but that does not mean that the Mac Studio is not very expensive hardware even for rich first world countries.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#635

Post by zozbot234 »

0x457 wrote: post #548
dabockster wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With proper mmap support you don't really need the entire model in memory. It can be streamed from a fast SSD, and this is more useful for MoE models where not all expert-layers are uniformly used. Of course the more data you stream from SSD, the slower this is; caching stuff in RAM is still relevant to good performance.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#636

Post by eigenspace »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #605
eigenspace wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think “a lot” is heavily exaggerated- more like a few niche users.

Oh yeah, the market for these capabilities is tiny, no doubt. But at least historically, the people that wanted these things tended to be very big lucrative customers, and also tended to be very influential word-of-mouth Apple evangalists.

Just as a random personal example, my uncle was an Apple guy since the 80s, and when I was a kid in the early 2000s he always had a Mac Pro, several Macbook pros, and a bunch of other Apple gear. He played a big role in convincing all of his 3 other brothers that Apple was the way to go, and those brothers then raised kids in households with only Apple computers.

This uncle is still a mostly Apple user, but he's increasingly pissed at Apple, and definitely no longer evangelical in recommending it to people. He needs to have a linux server machine for his home NAS, and another one for some specialized work applications and it really frustrates him that Apple abandoned his market segment.

I think there's a real possibility that if Apple had pissed him off like this in the early 2000s instead of the 2020s, that our wider family might have not ended up as being so Apple centric, so Apple may have missed out on a lot more sales than just a couple of Mac Pros and expensive software licenses.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#637

Post by twoodfin »

mrkpdl wrote: post #210

The 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…

I also think Apple wasn’t sure 5 years ago that a product like the Mac Studio would be accepted by the market. Memories of the G4 Cube and all…

But it’s a great product, does fulfill the bulk of needs for most “Pro” desktop use cases, and what’s left isn’t interesting or profitable enough to sustain a separate product line.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#638

Post by foldr »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #589
NetMageSCW wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The sad part is that DDR5 is the thing that doesn't need to be soldered, unlike GDDR. But then Apple solders it anyway. Apple needs to solder it because they are attaching it directly to the SOC to minimize lead length and that is part of how they are able to get that bandwidth.

Systems with socketed RAM have had on-die memory controllers for more than two decades. CAMM2 supports the same speeds as Apple is using in the M5.

CAMM2 most likely wouldn't work for the Max and Ultra chips:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43266848

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43267075

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#639

Post by giwook »

embedding-shape wrote: post #416
giwook wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how much do you trust Chinese hardware?

Give that most of mine, and probably yours, and probably most of the world's computers are in fact made in China one way or another, some higher percentage than others, I'm guessing most of us trust our hardware enough to continue using it.

True. I was specifically referring to "modded Chinese hardware" from some unknown, unvetted third party versus say through a well-known brand that hopefully has its own rigorous QA and security processes in place.
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