That's nothing, I've got a PC running Batocera hooked up to a CRT TV. Mainly use it to play 240p arcade games, though run a bit of 3D stuff on there too like Sega Model 2/3, Saturn, NAOMI etc.
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MP All Models 2023 Mac Pro! [MERGED]
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That's nothing, I've got a PC running Batocera hooked up to a CRT TV. Mainly use it to play 240p arcade games, though run a bit of 3D stuff on there too like Sega Model 2/3, Saturn, NAOMI etc.
Ok that’s fair. That is certainly a use case. But that is far more niche than the last Mac Pro could cover. I’m thinking 3D rendering, effects work, including at 8k resolutions, because as people aren’t shy to point out, the M2 ultra GPU is good, probably plenty for me, but can’t hold a candle to PCIe graphics cards. And the RAM limitation is also a problem. If you’re doing real-time effects work, it’s happiest with real-time previews in RAM. Now? It’s a hard limit.
Been anxiously awaiting news of the Mac Pro for almost a year since my 2017 retina iMac is beginning to have trouble with certain functions. To my surprise we saw the Mac Pro announced, but to my dismay you can’t add RAM yourself, which is where the savings is.
So now I am likely going with the maxed out Mac Studio but it is so expensive man! And it pisses me off that Apple screws you by not including ANYTHING with it, not even a freakin mouse! Apple abandoned target display mode so we can’t use the 2017 iMac as a monitor either, so there’s more $$.
I paid $3k for a pretty maxed out iMac in 2017 and wish they had another 27” iMac now bc this one will be $7k plus the monitor. Crazy $, and yes I need it for production work. So I’m conflicted both ethically and financially and also concerned they will release the iMac or a cheaper alternative in 6 months (unlikely?). I know the Studio will be blazing but damn, we are getting nailed and blackballed by Apple continuously upselling by way of discontinuing.
What are you all doing, esp people in my situation? Thanks!!
If a 2017 iMac can still perform what you need today. Then I don't think you must go for a maxed out Mac Studio.
Just buy what you can afford make more sense to me. e.g. A $2K Mac Studio is already few times faster than your current iMac. And you can spend another 1K to get a reasonably good monitor. The overall cost is just ~3K.
Thanks and not a bad idea, I figured it would be smarter to future proof as I have in the past by maxing it out. But I just went to spec it out and the upcharge for 4tb ssd and extra ram pushes it over $4k so at that point it may be smarter to just max it out.
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I think this pro is destined for failure. If you're going to spend a gigantic sum of money on a computer you're going to want to upgrade over its life... that's what the pro was designed for! Now it's even more expensive and you must max it out from the start because it's not upgradable later on... even a daughter card to change the processor would have been a good idea. Plus they've already got PCI card adaptors you link via thunderbolt, right?
I'm happy to be corrected, but everything I've seen is that its not a Hololens-style AR system where you have a translucent lens you can see through when the device is powered off.
What Apple has done is make a standard video passthrough VR/AR system. So there's no brightness overlay issue. You're not seeing the real world through it, you're seeing a video feed from the forward optical cameras.
Holy smokes, man, you've got an answer for everything. You mistakenly think that everyone must use 100% of what's available in a product or it "isn't for them." The fact remains that somehow, some way, Apple managed to make the Mac Pro both flexible and functional yet also reasonably priced for the first 5 models. This is not that.
I am just pointing out that Apple's business model is not geared to cater to everyone.
If a feature gets left out that means not enough demand to bother with.
So what? The Corvette makes up a tiny fraction of GM's bottom line, but yet here we are w/ a completely clean-sheet, mid-engined design. For some silly reason, they still decide to produce it, despite its small fraction. By your logic, the the entire Mac lineup should just be sh*tcanned because there aren't that many people (relatively speaking) that use it compared to the iPhone.
And just to be clear, regardless of whether a Macintosh line even exists, that absolute stupidity that drives Apple to give top billing on ANY update— iOS, tvOS, popsicleOS, whatever— to 21 new emoji is mind-boggling.
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I can't agree with this enough. Leave them as an "also mentioned" if you think they're important. But for crying out loud stop focusing on them. They're idiotic and don't matter, and thinking they actually do sell new devices is laughable at best.
Flawed logic. Original iMac is a great example. There was a lot of demand to still have a floppy drive and almost no demand for USB. Yet we lost the former and got the latter.
Once again, somehow, some way, they managed to provide a well-rounded machine w/ PCIe slots for just a few hundred $$ more than a MacBook Pro 15" back around 2010. You can defend it all you want, but I assure you that jacking up the price another $1000 on top of an already-outrageous $6000 sticker (while simplifying and removing capability) when I could pick up pretty much any PC anywhere for under $1000 TOTAL and get slots is unreasonable and not the result of Apple not gearing up to cater to everyone...it's just faulty logic and greed.
I would bet there's so much pent-up demand for a Mac Pro like the "good old days" where enthusiasts and pros alike could get their hands on a nicely expandable and powerful system at a reasonable price that their "business model" would be set on its ear if they were to make it and price it that way.
Apple was trying to build a chip with enough cpu and gpu cores that would make the machine worth the tradeoffs of not being able to upgrade the CPU or GPU. They failed to do so, delayed the product, then realized they couldn't produce the chip afterall and stuck the m2 Mac Studio chip in the machine instead. Then they released the product at the marketing-driven price point of $1000 more than the last model while glossing over it at the keynote knowing that the less they say the better.
Slight debate here, and I'm going to circle back to your Corvette analogy since I've been driving them (road and track) nearly exclusively since 1996. The Corvette is a halo product of sorts. It's not a loss leader, which a lot of halos are, but it shines a light on all of the things GM can actually do right. And do very, very right. Even though the plant would struggle to produce more than 40K units a year, which isn't even a drop in GM's ocean of sales, it gets a lot of attention in the auto industry, and even outside of the industry. It always has. The move to the ME was the correct thing to do from a purely engineering stand-point: trying to get gobs and gobs of torque delivered to the rear tires in a front-mid engine car is just challenging as the last Z06 and ZR1 both demonstrated (been there, done that, drove both on the track).
Counter that with the Mac Pro and Apple's market. Like GM's Corvette, the Mac Pro makes up a minuscule percentage of Apple's overall sales. Where are their sales? The iPhones and iPads. Really. The difference is: the auto industry actually cares about the Corvette and sees it as the halo product that it is. Apple's market of i[Phone,Pad] buyers? I honestly don't think they care. Not even remotely. In fact I'd bet on of my sizeable paychecks they don't. Most of them probably don't even know about Macs at all. ;-)
So I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure it's an apt analogy in this case.
So as feared, Apple just released a disposable "Pro" machine that starts at $7,000.
Safe to say the consensus here is: Not impressed. Not buying.
Way to go, Apple. Way to freakin' go.
Safe to say the consensus here is: Not impressed. Not buying.
Way to go, Apple. Way to freakin' go.
It is not "3X". A Mac Studio the is equipped with the same "ultra" chip as the base model Mac Proc sells for $4,000. The Mac Pro is $7,000. So it is 1.75 times more expensive, not 3x more when you compare Apples to Apples. (Bad pun intended.)
It is still fair to ask if the higher price is worth it. I guess it is if you really do need the PCI slots and maybe the (I assume) better cooling.
The Mac Studio will appeal to more people. The base model Studio is reasonably affordable and competes well with higher-speced M2-Pro based Minis.
Extremely disappointed with this Mac Pro announcement — this is an unequivocal regression in GPU performance compared to the high end configurations of the 2019 Intel Mac Pro.
The M2 Ultra looks like a fantastic solution for prosumer video effects workloads but will be insufficient for scientific GPU-driven data modeling applications given the performance metrics provided by Apple.
My colleagues and I love the Mac and were eagerly awaiting the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. However, given the direction of this product line, we have decided to transition to a Windows or Linux-based platform (e.g., Boxx, Lamda’s Vector Workstation, etc.) that provide the necessary GPU compute to power modern scientific data modeling workflows.
The M2 Ultra looks like a fantastic solution for prosumer video effects workloads but will be insufficient for scientific GPU-driven data modeling applications given the performance metrics provided by Apple.
My colleagues and I love the Mac and were eagerly awaiting the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. However, given the direction of this product line, we have decided to transition to a Windows or Linux-based platform (e.g., Boxx, Lamda’s Vector Workstation, etc.) that provide the necessary GPU compute to power modern scientific data modeling workflows.
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and that was useing the high speed ssd as sawp to mask that.
It does already compete with the 3090. If your field is machine learning or scientific computing. The M2 Ultra chip's unified memory means it can have 193 GB of VRAM. So it can do many things the 3090 can't do.
Both TensorFlow and PyTorch now run on Apple Silicon. This is a big deal. Machine Learning and AI is a growing field
And yet here we are today. No one uses floppies. USB-A is on its way out.
The product mix, how often they are refreshed and their respective price points are representative of demand.
User requirements change over time. The high demand or tower desktops pre-2006 has to do with raw performance. Laptops were not fast enough.
What you describe above is decades ago.
The Apple Watch Ultra that came out 8 months ago likely has as much peak raw performance as a 2010 MBP 15". So people opt for a smaller device than a tower this decade.
The frequency of how often the Mac Pro vs Mac Studio gets refreshed is another indicator on user demand.
Mac Studio without PCIe slots get refreshed in less than 1.3yrs while a Mac Pro with PCIe slots gets refreshed every ~4 years in the last decade?
With AS Mac Pro expect a refresh in sync with the Mac Studio.
Onelifenofear said that "(Apple) have sold about 80,000 MPX units separate to the mac pro as upgrades." That's $0.25-0.5 million over a nearly 4 year period.
Does this mean that mean less than half a million 2019 Mac Pros were sold during that product life cycle assuming 20% of them bought a MPX Module?
That is pretty tepid demand for any PC workstation brand much less a $3 trillion company like Apple.
If Apple were to not develop a Mac Studio and instead kept both PCIe users and non-users into a single product line then that $7k would probably be $6k like the 2019 Mac Pro.
The majority of users who never wanted PCIe slots are forced to buy it to subsidize the very vocal minority who do.
2023 Mac Studio M2 Ultra users save $2k from avoiding the 2019 Mac Pro and $3k from the 2023 Mac Pro. The lowering of cost by not imposing unwanted features helped stimulate sales.
Back in 2002 I bought a Power Macintosh G4 1.0 DP (QS 2002) for $3k. If a Mac Studio equivalent was on offer at 43% off for under $1,714 I'd not think and just buy it. Those PCI slots were never used. We just needed the fastest Mac available at that time that's why subsidized PCI users.
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What do you run the OS and the application in if all but 3GB is being used as VRAM?
OK, makes sense. So your 'eyes' shown at the front are via a display or some type of mirror?