MP All Models Everyone's complaining about the Mac Pro's 192 GB RAM limit and no video card support. Do older MPs with 1.5 TB RAM outperform it?

[impulse462]

On any custom-built PC tower, let alone any workstation class system from Dell, HP, or similar, I can put in any GPU I want. I can put in more than one. I can mix and match NVIDIA and AMD, if I so choose. On an Intel Mac Pro tower, my options are drastically more limited. I can do NVIDIA through macOS Big Sur at the absolute latest and, even then, my options are way limited. So, we're left with AMD cards that are probably too new to be really appreciated for a 2012 Mac Pro using a 2010 era Xeon and system architecture and MPX modules specific to a 2019 Mac Pro that is likely not going to be able to support anything newer than the MPX modules that were available up until the time that the 2023 Mac Pro came out. Relative to what I can do on any other Intel based workstation, that's hostile to GPU upgrades in my book.




I was comparing what was available from Apple in the 2019 Mac Pro to the M2 Ultra in the 2023 Mac Pro. I don't doubt that NVIDIA has had better, but that's neither here nor there.

Lol this is the most revisionist history/spin BS I have ever seen. Every mac pro up until the trashcan was loudly spouted as having support for 3rd party nvidia + amd GPUs. Now apple is unable to support them, and you're touting the apple marketing line: "oh theyve always been hostile to 3rd party gpu support" reminds me of doublethink in 1984.

They made it "hostile" after they threw a tantrum and stopped signing nvidias drivers which you conveniently forgot to mention. Whatever perceived hostility that you mention is Apple's OWN DOING.

I'm using an nvidia GPU with another OS on my 7,1. I'm mixing and matching hardware and operating systems, which you clearly stated is not hostile behavior. I can do more on this computer than i can with a standard windows/linux box, except run an nvidia GPU on macOS again because of apples brat-like behavior.

 

[mcnallym]

Lol this is the most revisionist history/spin BS I have ever seen. Every mac pro up until the trashcan was loudly spouted as having support for 3rd party nvidia + amd GPUs. Now apple is unable to support them, and you're touting the apple marketing line: "oh theyve always been hostile to 3rd party gpu support" reminds me of doublethink in 1984.

They made it "hostile" after they threw a tantrum and stopped signing nvidias drivers which you conveniently forgot to mention. Whatever perceived hostility that you mention is Apple's OWN DOING.

I'm using an nvidia GPU with another OS on my 7,1. I'm mixing and matching hardware and operating systems, which you clearly stated is not hostile behavior. I can do more on this computer than i can with a standard windows/linux box, except run an nvidia GPU on macOS again because of apples brat-like behavior.

Nvidia certainly not blameless.

despite Nvidiagate with the 8600m then Apple continued to support Nvidia and later macs used Nvidia up until 2015. So some 7 years after nvidagate, so bit delayed for a tantrum about it.

with the move to metal then Apple was clear in that wanted software developed to use Metal, even giving up on OpenCL which has been touting as the direction going in. It was with Mojave that the drivers cut off, however if Nvidia not insisted on including CUDA in the driver when Apple being clear that Metal was where Mac OS headed then would apple have frozen them out. beta versions of Mojave had Nvidia support so only be final release where dropped.

software using metal will run on AMD or Nvidia whereas CUDA means Nvidia required. Would end up if apple selling computers with AMD then wouldn’t run the CUDA software.

apparently one of the reasons Apple went for the split board with the 4,1 was that on the 2008 then if you bought a single CPU model then was still a Dual CPU board so not all the PCIe slots worked without the second socket populated and were getting calls about faulty slots. For the 4,1 then wether single or dual had same PCIe slots available.

if apple saying won’t sign drivers with CUDA is being bratty and throwing a tantrum then so is Nvidia‘s insistence on including CUDA when been told by the customer that not going to be included if insist on CUDA.

nvidia put out information that was Apple blocking the drivers which Apple just didn’t respond too.

not saying was you but some of the more vocal people for GPU card support raising the “customer is always right“ argument and Apple being the customer of nvidia then based on that then Apple was “customer is always right” in not signing drivers having told Nvidia not to include CUDA as Metal was what they wanted with Mac OS.

basically 2 pig headed companies banging heads, with the “winner“ being the one that controls the OS and the losers being the end users. In supplier vs customer like that then only going to Apple that won as effectively they could stop Nvidia. Nvidia could only play to the public audience and try and pressure through them. However Apple remarkably hard nosed when comes to there plans and idea of where going.

the move with the Mac Pro 2019 from the 2013 didn’t affect there overall plan with Mac OS with Metal and overall platform. Before anyone tries throwing that in.

 

[heretiq]

That page does not seem to discuss anything relevant. Number 48 appears only once on the page, and there is no mention of what the number is supposed to mean.

Here’s the table from that article showing 12GB and 48GB capacity LPDDR5 chips — purportedly available since July 2019:

@JouniS: Here’s a Jan 2023 article announcing availability of Micron’s 24GB and 48GB LPDDR5 modules: https://www.gizmochina.com/2023/01/18/micron-unveils-24gb-and-48gb-ddr5-memory-modules/

Despite the purported July 2019 release date in the table and given Micron’s availability announcement in mid-January 2023, I suspect those chips were either (a) not available/not validated when Apple had to make their sourcing decision — probably a year or more ahead of the M2 Ultra availability or (b) prohibitively expensive to burden the M2 Ultra Studio with for its designed use cases. I also suspect that we will see higher RAM configurations with the M3 AS iteration and/or the rumored Mac Pro - exclusive M3 Extreme in less than a year.🤞🏽

 

[JouniS]

Here’s the table from that article showing 12GB and 48GB capacity LPDDR5 chips — purportedly available since July 2019:

That table only says that it's possible to achieve 48 GB capacity with LPDDR5. It doesn't mention whether that means 48 GB in a die, package, module, or a system. It also doesn't mention whether the higher capacity is achieved with 4x higher bit density (which would be an enormous breakthrough), with 4x larger dies (which would not fit inside the M2 / Pro / Max / Ultra package), or with some combination of the two.

Here’s a Jan 2023 article announcing availability of Micron’s 24GB and 48GB LPDDR5 modules: https://www.gizmochina.com/2023/01/18/micron-unveils-24gb-and-48gb-ddr5-memory-modules/

DDR5, not LPDDR5.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Lol this is the most revisionist history/spin BS I have ever seen. Every mac pro up until the trashcan was loudly spouted as having support for 3rd party nvidia + amd GPUs.

It's not revisionist. That is how the Mac Pro has been since Apple dropped NVIDIA support. I'm not talking about the glory days of pre-trash can. Furthermore, Apple only ever provided support for GPUs that they, themselves shipped. For anything else, you'd need to provide a driver likely cobbled together from someone in the Hackintosh community.

Now apple is unable to support them, and you're touting the apple marketing line: "oh theyve always been hostile to 3rd party gpu support" reminds me of doublethink in 1984.

Apple never had a marketing line to claim anything negative about their own GPU support. Furthermore, Apple never claims anything negative about their own products.

What you likely meant to say is that I'm towing an Apple apologist line. Maybe. My own points of view on the 2019 and 2023 Mac Pros are not what I've largely been talking about on these forums. I've largely been reiterating Apple's stance (and very clearly stating that I do not necessarily agree with their decisions). It seems that, unlike pretty much everyone else in each of these 2023 Mac Pro centric threads, it seems, I'm not surprised by them.

They made it "hostile" after they threw a tantrum and stopped signing nvidias drivers which you conveniently forgot to mention. Whatever perceived hostility that you mention is Apple's OWN DOING.

All of this is Apple's doing. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here that isn't already insanely obvious in 2023.

I'm mixing and matching hardware and operating systems, which you clearly stated is not hostile behavior. I can do more on this computer than i can with a standard windows/linux box, except run an nvidia GPU on macOS again because of apples brat-like behavior.

I'm not going to deny that a 2019 Mac Pro is more flexible than a 2023 Mac Pro. That's kind of obvious and also entirely the point as to why the 2023 Mac Pro is such a head-scratcher.

Though, I will say that, Apple clearly isn't making this 2023 Mac Pro for your kind of use cases and it's debatable that they intended you to be able to put in NVIDIA card into that machine to run a different OS on it. Yes, I get that you have this ability and that this makes your 2019 Mac Pro stand out as being a particularly good value, but you are technically doing so in a configuration not supported by Apple, whereas, HP and Dell and anyone else making a Xeon workstation not only supports you putting in NVIDIA GPUs; they practically expect it (assuming it's not standard). Yes, that is Apple's bratty behavior and bad blood with NVIDIA. That's also the fact that Apple clearly is not making the same kind of workstation tower that their competitors are.

 

[Serqetry]

I think you should wait until someone tests the mac pro m2 for audio. You might find that you dont need to load all your plug-ins into ram and the performance is really good. Just saying.

This has already been done. The reports are that it's not good at all.

 

[Boil]

This has already been done. The reports are that it's not good at all.

Link to these reports...?

 

[Serqetry]

Link to these reports...?

I looked in my histories but couldn't find what I am referring to. But let me just say I used to believe that 192gb was more than anyone needed because I also write music and do just fine with 64gb... because I use mostly synthesizers, not large sample libraries. However, after reading various things from people that are using around 600gb of samples, I believe them when they say switching to Apple Silicon is just no good for them. Yes for the people who don't rely on 300gb+ sample libraries, the new Mac Pro is fine. More importantly, the Mac Studio is fine. The fact is, what Apple did is stupid because it makes working like that impossible with any new Mac.

 

[Gudi]

Wow you are saying its unreasonable for the customer base to want certain features? In a market-based society this is how the world works. You are nitpicking this single technical detail as if its the end all be all, but to someone who needs lots of ram, having unified ram doesn't matter! so nitpick away. The customer is always right.

No, the customer always has the right to buy from someone else. It’s Apple’s decision, what they want to offer to the market and the regulators decision, what is and isn’t a legal product.

 

[Gudi]

That’s not their problem, it’s Apple’s.

No, it’s Microsoft’s problem, because they are the ones who allow a proliferation of all kinds of hardware configurations. An Apple Silicon Mac always has unified memory and always offers both high performance and high efficiency cores. Programmers can rely on these expectations and write code that will scale and run with the utmost speed and efficiency on every Mac.

 

[Matty_TypeR]

No, the customer always has the right to buy from someone else.

This will be what people do. The more Apple try to lock people into the Apple ecosphere the more people will leave. And once people share the leaving experience with upgrade path's and cost more will leave. people don't like being locked in.

The Apple prison has begun.

 

[impulse462]

No, it’s Microsoft’s problem, because they are the ones who allow a proliferation of all kinds of hardware configurations. An Apple Silicon Mac always has unified memory and always offers both high performance and high efficiency cores. Programmers can rely on these expectations and write code that will scale and run with the utmost speed and efficiency on every Mac.

The typical line of the Apple apologist: it’s everyone’s fault but Apple’s. Apples products are so great because I watched their carefully crafted 2 hour advertisement and I’ll just parrot what they say. No one who does something other than make iOS apps used Metal.

You know what programmers who write applications for workstations want to do? Use CUDA. But they can’t with this abomination of a machine.

 

[avro707]

This will be what people do. The more Apple try to lock people into the Apple ecosphere the more people will leave. And once people share the leaving experience with upgrade path's and cost more will leave. people don't like being locked in.

The Apple prison has begun.

Eventually Apple will run itself into obscurity.

If the iDevices end up being challenged by something very strong, Apple could be at risk. Same for laptop computers.

The more they lock everything down, people will eventually go elsewhere.

 

[Gudi]

The typical line of the Apple apologist: it’s everyone’s fault but Apple’s.

I just explained how a market economy works. It's not a customer dictatorship.

Apples products are so great because I watched their carefully crafted 2 hour advertisement and I’ll just parrot what they say. No one who does something other than make iOS apps used Metal.

I think I specifically said, you can buy from another company. As a customer you can't demand that Apple bows to your needs. Your power is to pick and choose what's best for you. Plenty of other people are fine with what Apple has to offer.

You know what programmers who write applications for workstations want to do?

Nobody cares.

Use CUDA. But they can’t with this abomination of a machine.

And that's good. There already is a platform for this huge abomination. You're just trying to use the wrong OS.

 

[Gudi]

Eventually Apple will run itself into obscurity. If the iDevices end up being challenged by something very strong, Apple could be at risk. Same for laptop computers. The more they lock everything down, people will eventually go elsewhere.

The largest computer market is smartphones. The largest profit maker in this market is the iPhone. These profits directly feed into the development of the most efficient CPU architecture on the smallest process node. There's nothing that competes with Apple on performance and price. Just look at the Apple Vision Pro and how far ahead it is of everything that came before! Good luck for everyone dumb enough to "challenge" Apple directly. The only chance for survival is in a market niche Apple doesn't (yet) care about. Facebook just got sherlocked and people here like to pretend, that Apple will run into obscurity. Utter absurdity.

 

[Matty_TypeR]

The largest computer market is smartphones. The largest profit maker in this market is the iPhone. These profits directly feed into the development of the most efficient CPU architecture on the smallest process node. There's nothing that competes with Apple on performance and price. Just look at the Apple Vision Pro and how far ahead it is of everything that came before! Good luck for everyone dumb enough to "challenge" Apple directly. The only chance for survival is in a market niche Apple doesn't (yet) care about. Facebook just got sherlocked and people here like to pretend, that Apple will run into obscurity. Utter absurdity.

The thing is people are leaving apple because of cost. the worst Iphone sales year to date. £1200 for a MAX iphone, is not a great price. plus its hardly a computer. I use my phone for very little apart from call's and email.

It may be the biggest market, but how much more can they do with a phone. again after 3 years the battery is most likely 80% of new. People dont want £1500 phones today. Madness in todays climate.

 

[avro707]

The thing is people are leaving apple because of cost. the worst Iphone sales year to date. £1200 for a MAX iphone, is not a great price. plus its hardly a computer. I use my phone for very little apart from call's and email.

That's a good point - it's a phone, can do some mobile internet browsing and email and a few other basic things - when you see the cost of the top iPhones (or others) it's madness. In my country at least with everyone tied to multi-million-dollar mortgages, they can't throw away money at devices like these. The old one that works fine will do, because there isn't another option.

 

[ChrisA]

Clearly not everyone is complaining. I certainly am not

Yes! I am still waiting for some actual Mac Studio or Mac Pro user to say "I just can not get my work done with my new max-out Mac Studio"

Until we hear from users complaining about the M2 Ultra being so under powered that they are forced to build their own Linux PC, until then, I'd say Apple got it right.

BTW, the ONLY reason for the PCI slots on the MP are so some users can access their media. A lot of video footage is on a very specialized fiber optic network, or maybe you need a Black Magic HDMI card or high-end audio. No one puts GPU cards in the PCI slots, that is not the reason for them.

PCI is actually kind of slow and will go away soon enough in favor of things like TB4. Same with RAM sticks, they are just too slow and will go away soon enough

 

[impulse462]

BTW, the ONLY reason for the PCI slots on the MP are so some users can access their media. A lot of video footage is on a very specialized fiber optic network, or maybe you need a Black Magic HDMI card or high-end audio. No one puts GPU cards in the PCI slots, that is not the reason for them.

PCI is actually kind of slow and will go away soon enough in favor of things like TB4. Same with RAM sticks, they are just too slow and will go away soon enough

An astoundingly absurd comment. Just absurd. When introducing the 2019 mac pro they spent 30 mins talking about how there are 8 pcie slots, how they "invented" a new MPX module with dual GPUs per card, and talked about other AMD GPUs are supported.

Now you come with revisionist history saying that the PCIe slots on the mac pro were never mean't for GPUs??? Just astounding. Unbelievable job of Apple's marketing.

 

[impulse462]

I just explained how a market economy works. It's not a customer dictatorship.

I think I specifically said, you can buy from another company. As a customer you can't demand that Apple bows to your needs. Your power is to pick and choose what's best for you. Plenty of other people are fine with what Apple has to offer.

Nobody cares.

And that's good. There already is a platform for this huge abomination. You're just trying to use the wrong OS.

View attachment 2227806

I don't use the large Geforce gaming cards. I use the professional 2 slot nvidia cards but those are for workstation GPUs.

You can't demand from Apple except when people demanded the 2013 trashcan was an awfully designed computer and they released the 2019 mac pro to address every single one of the concerns that people complained about. But yes we can't demand anything from apple. You might be find be sucked dry and taken a fool of but some others aren't.

You respond with "nobody cares" what programmers write but in your previous post you wrote "Programmers can rely on these expectations and write code that will scale and run with the utmost speed and efficiency on every Mac." Absolute drivel of a response clearly by someone who doesn't use desktop workstations in a professional environment.

 

[Mike Richardson]

You know, maybe there would be more than 75,000 units a year if the god damned machine didn't cost $6,999.

Although we don't have any actual sales numbers, it's pretty obvious to me from looking at the resale market that they used to move a lot more Mac Pro's pre-2019.

(not intended to be a criticism of Longplay or his remarks)

When users of a certain use case dwindle to the point it cannot be economically serviced further then any business sadly let go.

AMD/Intel >7.5 million/year workstation business. Apple sadly has ~75,000/year.

 

[GregStudio]

As a fair bit of this thread is dedicated to the pro audio use of a MP, I couldn’t help myself from replying to this thread 😁.

PCIe slots can be replaced by thunderbolt devices, despite what so many people claim... audio hardware has largely moved on to thunderbolt solutions, and there's always external thunderbolt PCIe cages if you want to keep using non-thunderbolt devices.

It’s true that in some cases thunderbolt can replace PCIe slots and in other cases there are Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures. However, in many of these cases it’s both more messy (more boxes, cables and power supplies) and more expensive to do so. In other cases, in addition to the above it’s also a lot less efficient.

But RAM for sample libraries is actually something that's important for some people and there's no easy way around that.

By “some people” you actually mean incredibly few people! Sure, RAM is important for cacheing samples, audio files and plugins but that just requires a few gigs of RAM, exceedingly few cache entire sample libraries! Even cacheing all the audio for an entire feature film usually requires less than 12GB of RAM, a song of just a few mins obviously requires far less.

For the vast majority of music production 64GB RAM will be plenty. For some pro users 128GB RAM might be the safe choice. Only for an extremely tiny fraction would 192GB be insufficient!

Much less critical than being able to go above 192GB of RAM. The need for PCIe slots is exaggerated by people who don't even know what actual Mac Pro owners want or need.

Actually, I’d say the opposite: The need for PCIe slots is undervalued by people who don’t even know the use case for Mac Pros and PCIe!

In top tier commercial music studios and pretty much all audio post for film/TV, ProTools HDX is the required/preferred system and HDX is a PCIe card. You can put it in a Sonnet Thunderbolt PCIe chassis but that’s going to cost ~900 Euro for 1 card or ~1500 Euro for a 2 or 3 card system. Audio post is obviously going to need video, a 4K genlocked PCIe card is about 800 Euro cheaper than an equivalent thunderbolt version.

The real killer is storage though: With a Mac Studio I’d need Apple’s 8TB internal storage option plus a Thunderbolt Raid but with a Mac Pro only a 1TB Apple SSD and something like OWC’s Accelsior 8m2 with no external Raid. This alone is about 2,000 Euro cheaper and conveniently, faster than Apple’s internal storage and vastly faster than than a thunderbolt Raid array.

Composers are less likely to use Pro Tools, more likely a native DAW like Logic or Cubase, but most composers don’t compose full orchestral scores using the huge sample libraries (such as Vienna) and those who do, commonly don’t try to load the entire library into the RAM of a single computer.

I can see that the new MP won’t suit your personal current workflow but your obvious dissatisfaction and resultant agenda is misrepresenting the facts. Your workflow is incredibly rare within the pro audio community and might not even be an issue anyway, streaming samples from a very fast PCIe Raid Array might even be better/more flexible in some cases.

For everyone else; the new Mac Pro is certainly an attractive option for many audio pros, although there’s no doubt that the capabilities of the Mac Studio will make it a more viable option for many/most who would otherwise have considered a MP in generations past. A more powerful MP wouldn’t have changed this equation and the same is likely true of many video editors. I presume that’s why they called it “Studio”?

G

 

[Yebubbleman]

This will be what people do. The more Apple try to lock people into the Apple ecosphere the more people will leave. And once people share the leaving experience with upgrade path's and cost more will leave. people don't like being locked in.

The Apple prison has begun.

Has begun? Brother, where have you been? It's been going on since 2011, since iCloud made your choice of computer and choice of phone no longer two independent decisions for the vast majority of Apple users! Hell, they glued in batteries and made RAM soldered on the laptops a decade ago! The Apple prison has been hopping for years now!

The typical line of the Apple apologist: it’s everyone’s fault but Apple’s. Apples products are so great because I watched their carefully crafted 2 hour advertisement and I’ll just parrot what they say. No one who does something other than make iOS apps used Metal.

You know what programmers who write applications for workstations want to do? Use CUDA. But they can’t with this abomination of a machine.

Apple no longer caters to you. Hell, they stopped catering to you BEFORE the 2019 Mac Pro and didn't exactly keep to catering to you when it came out especially seeing as they stopped putting NVIDIA into anything past 2015 and dropped any native NVIDIA driver support by the time the 2019 Mac Pro came out. That's not Apple apologism to point that out. That's just fact. It's also not Apple apologism to reiterate the content of a keynote that pretty much spelled that out, especially since you are already in agreement with the fact that said keynote spelled that out. I'm definitely empathetic. I definitely get the inclination to moan about it, but taking that out at people, most of whom as far as I can tell aren't towing Apple's line as much as...again...agreeing with the notion that Apple isn't catering to you...well...seems counter-productive at best.

Apple doesn't care about the kind of people that enjoy PCIe Intel Mac Pros for their expandability. Apple cares about the kind of people that didn't balk in 2016 when their $3000 laptop didn't allow for replaceable/upgradeable RAM or storage and still don't care about it today. The good news is that there's other hardware that does more or less the same kinds of things that doesn't suck and can run other OSes that also don't suck. I wouldn't lament too hard that you can't spend $6000+ on a Mac you had to go against the OEM's own best practices to use the way you wanted to. That was always a raw deal.

Yes! I am still waiting for some actual Mac Studio or Mac Pro user to say "I just can not get my work done with my new max-out Mac Studio"

Until we hear from users complaining about the M2 Ultra being so under powered that they are forced to build their own Linux PC, until then, I'd say Apple got it right.

While I agree that most of the complaining about the 2023 Mac Pro is more about specs-based FUD than anything; there will undoubtedly be those that will inherently have difficulty, let alone inability to do what they need to do on this machine (that was perfectly possible on the 2019 model). Apple makes it seem very much like any M2 Ultra GPU core configuration will beat out any single AMD GPU in that Mac Pro. They are cagey at best about multi-GPU workloads. Then again, they did do research when trying to figure out what mistakes to not repeat from the 2013 Mac Pro and among them was the assumption that many Mac Pro customers benefited from multiple GPUs (turns out most of them didn't; I'm guessing this factors heavily into the decision to the M2 Ultra's GPU being considered an adequate replacement for most folks).

All that to say that there will probably be higher-end use-case users that are x% of the Mac Pro customer base (where x is a number roughly equal to the number of percentage that Mac Pro users represent out of all Mac customers) that can't be served by the 2023 Mac Pro. It will be a niche sect of an already niche sect. Yes, there are going to be users left out in the cold. You can't say that Apple got it 100% right if those users are left out in the cold. You can say that they got it right for most Mac Pro customers. You can say that they got it right for the customer use cases that they cared about. But you can't say it's a success all around.

BTW, the ONLY reason for the PCI slots on the MP are so some users can access their media. A lot of video footage is on a very specialized fiber optic network, or maybe you need a Black Magic HDMI card or high-end audio. No one puts GPU cards in the PCI slots, that is not the reason for them.

First off, that's largely wrong. On the x86-64 tower/workstation side of things, PCIe is host to GPUs. You are correct that the main reason for PCIe to exist ON THE MACINTOSH is for specialized cards. But you're wrong in that no one does this. In fact, there are several threads on this site (with more being added daily) of people throwing in new cards into 11-16 year old Mac Pro towers. People will undoubtedly try to do this with the 2019 Mac Pro as well.

If your point was that PCIe slots are only on an Apple Silicon Mac for these specialized cards, I'll wholeheartedly agree with you. But, that's far from why the 2019 Mac Pro had two MPX slots and why Apple even made MPX as a convention in any tower to begin with.

You are correct that there are a lot of people looking at the PCIe slots on the 2023 Mac Pro and wondering what the point is and that those same people are only considering the GPUs on a traditional tower such as the 2019 Mac Pro. But that's not an invalid use case even if the notion of that being the only use case is otherwise incorrect.

PCI is actually kind of slow and will go away soon enough in favor of things like TB4. Same with RAM sticks, they are just too slow and will go away soon enough

This is also wrong. Thunderbolt USES PCIe. It's PCIe on a port. It's only recently been powerful enough to host GPUs (which generally require the greatest bandwidth), but it's still fairly limited and it's going to take a long while for it to catch up to the latest PCIe spec (which will, itself, also be advancing).

As for RAM sticks going away? Only going to happen in cases where (a) thinness is the top priority (e.g. All MacBook Airs, all Intel MacBook Pros with any kind of a retina display, and many PC ultrabooks trying to compete with the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro) and/or (b) where the RAM is a part of an SoC (e.g. Anything with any kind of Apple-designed SoC, let alone Apple Silicon Macs). It won't disappear in servers. It won't disappear in PC desktops and it won't disappear in most PC laptops.

 

[Matty_TypeR]

Has begun? Brother, where have you been? It's been going on since 2011, since iCloud made your choice of computer and choice of phone no longer two independent decisions for the vast majority of Apple users! Hell, they glued in batteries and made RAM soldered on the laptops a decade ago! The Apple prison has been hopping for years now!

This i know, but as the prison barge approaches the gates every year closer and closer, your destiny has been decided for you. When all is AS with intel and AMD no longer supported. The gates will close around you, slowly every year and then people wake up as its not cheap to be in this prison, The only way forward is to Upgrade, more expense. A lot of people will jump ship before they get locked in by Apple run by a dictatorship on what you can and can not do inside.

Democracy is a precious thing, the way forward is don't be fooled and buy what suits you and what you can afford.

 

[Yebubbleman]

This i know, but as the prison barge approaches the gates every year closer and closer, your destiny has been decided for you. When all is AS with intel and AMD no longer supported. The gates will close around you, slowly every year and then people wake up as its not cheap to be in this prison, The only way forward is to Upgrade, more expense. A lot of people will jump ship before they get locked in by Apple run by a dictatorship on what you can and can not do inside.

Democracy is a precious thing, the way forward is don't be fooled and buy what suits you and what you can afford.

My point is that we don't need to wait for everything to be Apple Silicon only for that to happen. Mac Pro users are arriving fairly late to this party, which, for all other Apple devices, has been on-going for the past decade. It's been that way with MacBook Pros for the last decade, and with iPads, iPhones, iPods and MacBook Airs since the very beginning. This stuff has always been expensive and Apple has always dictated the terms of being in their ecosystem. At best, this can only be a new phenomenon to someone that has only ever used PCIe-based Intel Mac Pro machines and nothing else. For all other Apple products, it's been a constant.

And yes, I vote with my dollars. In the Intel era, I needed a 15-inch or 16-inch MacBook Pro. In the Apple Silicon era, my needs are probably snugly met by a high-end 13-inch MacBook Pro or a 14-inch MacBook Pro with a binned Mx Pro SoC. Windows PCs handle the rest of my needs that would've previously been served just fine by that one larger Intel MacBook Pro. Oh well!