Too short, no Extreme processor, no holographic Steve Jobs as an interactive Apple Intelligence interface hovering over the top of the Cube... ;^p
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Apple's 2025 M4 Mac Pro: What to Expect
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Too short, no Extreme processor, no holographic Steve Jobs as an interactive Apple Intelligence interface hovering over the top of the Cube... ;^p
I like the trashcan form factor ... I think Apple Silicon could make this form factor work as it should have.
Oh, man, if they could pull that off the Apple faithful would flip out. And if they could program it with his personality so it castigated obstinate users...
Where has there been a rumour that the Mac Pro or Studio next year will be m5?
I'll be surprised if the 2025 released Mac Pro/Studio aren't M4 designs.
Yup, My Product Wishcast included a Cube, with the M* Quadra.
Absolutely will never ship, as Apple would just sell them in Mac Pros... why sell them in a cheaper box.
It'll be interesting. One potential consideration is Thunderbolt 5. I'm curious to see whether TB5 with supplement 3 & 4, or mainly appear in the higher-end personal computer segment. Given that TB5 is out now, and the Mac Studio and Mac Pro cater to higher end users and aren't refreshed as often as MacBooks, having them come out in mid. 2025, for example, with M4 and TB4 seems like setting them up to be a bit behind-the-curve for the new few years.
It's my understanding from other posts that the M4 Macs aren't likely to have TB5, whereas Apple has time to workout integrating TB5 into the M5 (I would think).
Perhaps a higher end M4 chip will offer TB5?
Note: not sure how important TB5 is likely to be to professional users apt to buy higher end desktop Macs.
Thunderbolt 5 is an interesting question.
There's only ONE computer on sale that has TB5, nobody else is rushing either?
Honestly, it feels like TB5 will be a slow roll-out. It is mostly only really needed for high bandwidth monitors that don't exist and eGPUs that Apple doesn't support.
We don't know for sure that M4 doesn't support TB5
I would expect TB5 Macs will ship in 2025/2026, and that will probably be fine.
Maybe they'll add it when Apple's SoC moves to chiplets?
It offers external SSD speeds a good deal faster than TB 3 or 4, closing a good deal of the gap with internal (and high-priced) Apple internal SSD upgrades. How much most people can perceive/experience that in most real world use I don't know. OWC is coming out with a TB5 external SSD. Another company has apparently announced a dock. I agree, the rollout is slow, but at some point will hit critical mass, and some people plan to keep their equipment in use a long time.
For those who want the maximum computing horsepower, but do not need PCIe slots...?
Which is a market, but nowhere near a large enough of one for Apple to care about. Apple will just tell them to pay for the PCIe slots
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I know and I agree but many utilize those PCI Express slots for workflows and that is why Apple continued the line because there are those customers that demand PCI slots. When I look at putting SSD storage in there when I would need say 64GB of the fastest SSD storage, audio cards, high end ethernet connections etc. it becomes the only option and also the only option at those PCI-4 speeds.
Myself, I have always envision utilizing the PCI slots when upgrading from my current Mac Pro. Yes, the Mac Studio is the best replacement for the cube ever but I do prefer having PCI slots for my big iron. A Mac Studio on the side or for travel situations where laptops would be too noisy etc.? Yes.
What I would like to see is an extreme chip to make it a true Mac Pro and rival everything else on the market, like it used to do. And I know that will command a higher price but after the 2019 Mac Pro, no problem. ECC ram would also be really a good thing as well for a Mac like that and would add to the pro side of things. PCI-5 or more full PCI-4 speeds across more of the slots would be more icing. I don't want a redesign!
We should know more about those plans once the M4 Max comes out. If the connection to connect two Max's together then no special Ultra chip. Or chip has no connection section and boom, anything is possible. I am hoping for the later.
The M-series Mac internal SSD speeds for the 512-gig & larger sizes I've seen posted before were well in excess of the maximum TB 3 or 4 external SSD speeds. TB 5 is expected to be a good deal faster than 3 or 4.
What does Apple use for their internal SSD connection?
Maybe, but I still want to see a modern ASi Cube; NeXTcube, Power Mac G4 Cube, Mac Pro Cube...!
Mac Pro Cube for those of us who do not need PCIe slots but want a Mn Extreme chip with gobs of GPU horsepower, thanks...!
Donan = M4
Brava = M4 Pro
2x Brava = M4 Max (laptop variant)
Hidra = M4 Max (desktop variant)
2x Hidra = M4 Ultra
4x Hidra = M4 Extreme
The M5 really would be the ultimate computer.
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My Mac Pro Dream Machine: Monolithic die M4 Ultra with twice the specs as an M4 Max (scales linearly), New AI card with "M4x" chip having multiple APU cores and onboard RAM for high capacity LLM inference, High speed bus slot for new AI card, Asic chip that caches pages of LLM models so that larger models can be run at acceptable speeds without full RAM requirements, Full speed PCIE 5.0 slots (no bus bandwidth sharing), and ..... Upgradable CPU module that can be traded into Apple so that businesses won't have to sell their old machine, and reinstall cards and drivers every time they upgrade.
Apple last updated the Mac Pro in June 2023, adding an M2 Ultra chip and officially completing the transition away from Intel chips. The Mac Pro uses the same M2 Ultra chip that's in the Mac Studio, leading to criticism about its lack of power.
Apple has now gone back to the drawing board and is working on an updated version of the Mac Pro that's set to come out next year. This guide highlights everything we know about Apple's Mac Pro progress.
M4 Chip
The next Mac Pro will have a chip that's in the M4 family, as Apple is working to update its entire Mac lineup to the M4 series across 2024 and 2025.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman believes that Apple wants to establish a more regular Apple silicon chip upgrade cycle that would perhaps see Mac chips refreshed on an annual basis much like chips designed for the iPhone.
Gurman says that the Mac Pro will be equipped with the highest-end version of the M4 chip, which is codenamed "Hidra." Hidra is likely equivalent to an "Ultra" chip based on the way that Apple has differentiated its chips in the past. The Mac Pro is aimed at professional videographers, photographers, designers, and others who need significant processing power, and some pro users are said to have been unhappy with the M2 Ultra Mac Pro.
As a result, Apple is looking to make the M4 Mac Pro more powerful.
All of the M4 chips will be designed with a focus on artificial intelligence, with Apple aiming to highlight the AI processing capabilities of the chips and how they'll integrate into macOS. Apple is adding AI features that will run solely on device to the next operating system updates, so the M4 chips will need to have a lot of compute power.
Rumors suggest that the M4 chips will feature an upgraded Neural Engine with more cores to handle AI tasks.
Unified Memory
The Mac Pro could support up to 500GB Unified Memory, way up from the current 192GB maximum.
Will there be an M3 Mac Pro?
It doesn't sound like Apple is going to bother with an M3 Ultra chip for the Mac Pro, with the company instead focusing effort on the M4 update.
Design Updates
The Mac Pro saw a major design update in 2019, with Apple doing away with the cylindrical "trash can" look in favor of a more reserved aluminum computer tower. There were no design changes to the 2022 model when it was refreshed, and so far we've heard nothing about design changes to the upcoming M4 variant.
Launch is still more than a year away though, so it's possible Apple will make some design updates, at least internally to support M4 chip changes.
Launch Date
The Mac Pro is expected to be the last of Apple's Macs to get the M4 chip, and rumors suggest that it will come out in late 2025.
Article Link: Apple's 2025 M4 Mac Pro: What to Expect
<Now falling back down to M2 Ultra earth>. Hey, a boy can dream.....
the ONLY thing that will make mac pro worth is is genuine GPU and PCIe support, every other workflow is better supported with the mac studio
Nothing wrong with some glorious wishcasting.
Could Apple build AI cards? Absolutely. Are they going to? Probaby not. What will their answer be? Just buy more Macs. Beyond some scaling inefficiency, these AI cards would just be NPU/GPU logic with gobs of memory, and the current motherboards already are that. Apple clearly has this problem too in their AI cloud services, so time will tell.
Maybe if Apple wants to, they'll ship another prototype Afterburner FPGA, but for AI.
Has anyone desoldered an Apple M* package to see how complicated the motherboard connection is? One of the values of on-package memory should be: the motherboard circuit connections should be far fewer and less sensitive than if the RAM was on the motherboard. It really should be possible for Apple to make the package itself removable. I still don't think Apple will do it, but it is a good dream.
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I wouldnt be surprised to eventually see a discrete Apple GPU supported in the mac pro, I doubt we’ll ever get third party GPU support back in MacOS though
I can maybe see an NVIDIA DGX Station-like approach to the GPU, or for Apple to contract that out to AMD (though I guess at this point Apple is quite happy with its own GPU cores, so why bother). I suspect PCIe-based GPUs are dead on the Mac, and given NVIDIA's approach, they may not be so long in the tooth elsewhere, too.
AI or 3D modelling cards are unlikely, but certainly possible.
However, there is zero chance of display output from PCIe cards.