Hard Truths About The Apple Silicon Replacement to the Mac Pro (2019)

[sam_dean]

I maintain that for Apple to make the "M2/3 Extreme" work economically, they will have to create an Apple Silicon Cloud where businesses can rent a Mac Pro for hours at a time. This is in addition to selling a traditional Mac Pro workstation. https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...t-a-40-core-soc-for-mac-pro-now-what.2306486/

If Apple went with the former employees who formed Nuvia then it would help.

 

[innominato5090]

2. There will be no PCIe GPU nor eGPU upgradability or expansion; the only GPU will be the one on the SoC.

Before anyone challenges me with that, make sure you have watched this video from WWDC 2020 (where the Intel to Apple Silicon transition was first announced): https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10686/ (at about the 1-minute mark)

While I agree it is unlikely, nothing about this precludes offering PCI-E based graphics accelerators. Could be as fancy Silicon SoCs on daughterboards, or as tame as the current Afterburner card.

 

[Choco Taco]

[...] most reliable leakers, [...] Mark Gurman

Um ... what?

 

[Philip Turner]

While I agree it is unlikely, nothing about this precludes offering PCI-E based graphics accelerators. Could be as fancy Silicon SoCs on daughterboards, or as tame as the current Afterburner card.

What software would use them? Apple really wants to forget about discrete GPUs in the Metal API, but they're keeping support for some extra years so current Intel MPB users can benefit from Metal 3. If not Metal, what will be used? OpenCL? The vendor has to produce a macOS-native driver for that, and MBPs as recent as 2019 are still stuck on OpenCL 1.2.

 

[IconDRT]

We wouldn’t be in this mess right now if all of you would have embraced the 6,1 from the beginning. Apple offered $700 wheels for the 7,1 just to taunt the pro crowd. The more you demand upgradeability and expandability, the more Apple will push their version of modular, you either get a pancake (Mini), a dumpster (Studio), or a sublime work of art (6,1). The box of slots is going bye-bye. I think the 6,1 design will return with a vengeance.

It would be cool if I could drop a couple Ultras in my 6,1 and upgrade to TB4.

Long alive the 6,1!

P.S. On a serious note, I am curious what Apple plans for the pro segment. It won’t affect me as a Studio would easily take care of my workflow and the 6,1 is still a competent daily driver.

 

[Siliconguy]

Last non AIO desktop I had was a 2002 Power Mac G4 QuickSilver. We never used its expansion slots or even drive bays.

Odd, I have one of those. One slot was taken up with a USB 2 card, and one with a SATA card that went to two hard drives. That was the machine I used until 2009.

I also have a 2005 G5 Mac upgraded with a USB 2 card.

The 2010 Mac Pro is upgraded with a USB 3 card and a NVME to PCI-e adapter card. It's currently running Monterey thanks to OCLP.

That probably explains why Apple hates upgradable machines.

 

[sam_dean]

Odd, I have one of those. One slot was taken up with a USB 2 card, and one with a SATA card that went to two hard drives. That was the machine I used until 2009.

I also have a 2005 G5 Mac upgraded with a USB 2 card.

The 2010 Mac Pro is upgraded with a USB 3 card and a NVME to PCI-e adapter card. It's currently running Monterey thanks to OCLP.

That probably explains why Apple hates upgradable machines.

We bought external drives and went all AIO & laptops.

We were satisfied with FW400 & FW800.

Never bought the G5 as we opted for Intel Macs in 2006.

I heard G5s were problematic and was the CPU that induced the PPC to Intel transition in 2005.

 

[deconstruct60]

So this will be a Mac Studio with expansion slots for non-SSD & non-GPU expansion.

Could anyone point out what sort of internal expansion are available currently for the market now that can use these expansion slots?

for 'non-SSD expansion' is false. Simply not true. Can end users replace the primary boot SSD drive? No. The SSD controller is inside the SoC. So there is no way to take it out and substitute your own design choice. The fact that the primary boot drive is split into multiple subcomponents and highly proprietary has exceeding little to do with the PCI-e slots being present or not. Adding additional drives is easy and supported.

The Sonnet Thunderbolt expansion products have a PCI-e compatibility support list. For example the Tech specs of the Echo III . (dive down into the details on the Echo III variant for instance).

Echo III Desktop - Tech Specs - SONNETTECH

View videos and tech specs for Echo III Desktop, determine hardware and OS compatibility, and see recommended accessories.

www.sonnettech.com

[ that should match the tech specs for the echo III variant of the xmac studio but that link is 'borked' at the moment and points to the wrong PDF file ( one for SSD drives as opposed to cards for the Echo III. )

xMac Studio - Tech Specs - SONNETTECH

View videos and tech specs for xMac Studio, and see recommended accessories.

www.sonnettech.com

]


There is a PDF file there with what Sonnet has tested for their systems. For the column "works with M1/M2" has over 50 cards that work with current systems. Thunderbolt really makes little material driver difference so all of these would readily work on internal slots in a new Mac Pro (that provisioned the backhaul for the slots somehow). The cards appear to the system as PCI-e cards . The drivers need to handle the 'hot plug' optional sections of the PCI-e standards but cards can't really 'see' Thunderbolt.

SSDs (i.e., NVMe cards) section is mostly full. Some stuff doesn't work or not tested, but most do. There is likely other products not even mentioned that do work.


There are three main sources as to why some cards are don't have a 'yes' next to them and also have a "M" for working on macOS.

1. Old. Cards where the manufacturer has either explicitly or pragmatically abandoned new driver development are going to make the list. Some stuff like generic standard NVMe drive or commonly used in/with Macs USB controllers might have basic macOS support. However, if it is old and specialized and abandoned, then it is likely dead.

2. Never had much macOS support in first place. Some stuff on the list doesn't even have a 'M'. (i.e., doesn't work on Mac Pro 2010 or 2019 either. )

3. very early boot interactions. For example: Needed to get boot screen up. Of proprietary software RAID driver needed to bootstrap the device. Anything that has major presumptions that heavily interacting with UEFI as a user interface stage.

[ Apple has tossed UEFI out the window and isn't coming back for early boot. Likewise the "One True Boot" environment only boots off the internal , trusted Apple SSD controller. That highly stripped down , protected, 'macOS like' environment isn't getting non Apple stuff. (e.g., in old days Apple included SoftRAIDs drivers in the bare bones kernels. They aren't doing that anymore. ). when the main macOS kernel gets going it can get a broader set of drivers off the disk. ]


There are a few cards that are on a slippery slope. First, there are a couple of footnotes like 22 and 24 warning that may not see full feature of the card due to Thunderbolt bandwidth limitation (e.g., x8 PCI-e v4 card being fed through a x4 PCI-e v3 'straw'. ) . [ I think some card may have some 'sanity' check in their on card firmware to halt if the PCI-e connection is 'too slow to be acceptable'. ]

The second isn't really overtly marked on the compatibility sheet. Apple has pronounced the kernel extensions as deprecated (at some future macOS iteration they will go away). macOS on Apple Silicon still allows this but at some point that will stop working. As point #1 above outlines... no active driver development is bad news over the long term. A quick hack to flip to Arm kext and then no effort to switch to DriverKit ... the card is a bit of a zombie.

[ That chart probably isn't completely up to date when there are competing Sonnet products with others. (one reason why I say 'over 50' ). I think some of the HighPoint SAS HBA cards might work if get the latest drivers from them. The count of 'works with M1" has incrementally gone up over last two years. It started off small, but there is a steady drip of incremental adds year over year. ]

 

[sam_dean]

for 'non-SSD expansion' is false. Simply not true. Can end users replace the primary boot SSD drive? No. The SSD controller is inside the SoC. So there is no way to take it out and substitute your own design choice. The fact that the primary boot drive is split into multiple subcomponents and highly proprietary has exceeding little to do with the PCI-e slots being present or not. Adding additional drives is easy and supported.

The Sonnet Thunderbolt expansion products have a PCI-e compatibility support list. For example the Tech specs of the Echo III . (dive down into the details on the Echo III variant for instance).

Echo III Desktop - Tech Specs - SONNETTECH

View videos and tech specs for Echo III Desktop, determine hardware and OS compatibility, and see recommended accessories.

www.sonnettech.com

[ that should match the tech specs for the echo III variant of the xmac studio but that link is 'borked' at the moment and points to the wrong PDF file ( one for SSD drives as opposed to cards for the Echo III. )

xMac Studio - Tech Specs - SONNETTECH

View videos and tech specs for xMac Studio, and see recommended accessories.

www.sonnettech.com

]


There is a PDF file there with what Sonnet has tested for their systems. For the column "works with M1/M2" has over 50 cards that work with current systems. Thunderbolt really makes little material driver difference so all of these would readily work on internal slots in a new Mac Pro (that provisioned the backhaul for the slots somehow). The cards appear to the system as PCI-e cards . The drivers need to handle the 'hot plug' optional sections of the PCI-e standards but cards can't really 'see' Thunderbolt.

SSDs (i.e., NVMe cards) section is mostly full. Some stuff doesn't work or not tested, but most do. There is likely other products not even mentioned that do work.


There are three main sources as to why some cards are don't have a 'yes' next to them and also have a "M" for working on macOS.

1. Old. Cards where the manufacturer has either explicitly or pragmatically abandoned new driver development are going to make the list. Some stuff like generic standard NVMe drive or commonly used in/with Macs USB controllers might have basic macOS support. However, if it is old and specialized and abandoned, then it is likely dead.

2. Never had much macOS support in first place. Some stuff on the list doesn't even have a 'M'. (i.e., doesn't work on Mac Pro 2010 or 2019 either. )

3. very early boot interactions. For example: Needed to get boot screen up. Of proprietary software RAID driver needed to bootstrap the device. Anything that has major presumptions that heavily interacting with UEFI as a user interface stage.

[ Apple has tossed UEFI out the window and isn't coming back for early boot. Likewise the "One True Boot" environment only boots off the internal , trusted Apple SSD controller. That highly stripped down , protected, 'macOS like' environment isn't getting non Apple stuff. (e.g., in old days Apple included SoftRAIDs drivers in the bare bones kernels. They aren't doing that anymore. ). when the main macOS kernel gets going it can get a broader set of drivers off the disk. ]


There are a few cards that are on a slippery slope. First, there are a couple of footnotes like 22 and 24 warning that may not see full feature of the card due to Thunderbolt bandwidth limitation (e.g., x8 PCI-e v4 card being fed through a x4 PCI-e v3 'straw'. ) . [ I think some card may have some 'sanity' check in their on card firmware to halt if the PCI-e connection is 'too slow to be acceptable'. ]

The second isn't really overtly marked on the compatibility sheet. Apple has pronounced the kernel extensions as deprecated (at some future macOS iteration they will go away). macOS on Apple Silicon still allows this but at some point that will stop working. As point #1 above outlines... no active driver development is bad news over the long term. A quick hack to flip to Arm kext and then no effort to switch to DriverKit ... the card is a bit of a zombie.

[ That chart probably isn't completely up to date when there are competing Sonnet products with others. (one reason why I say 'over 50' ). I think some of the HighPoint SAS HBA cards might work if get the latest drivers from them. The count of 'works with M1" has incrementally gone up over last two years. It started off small, but there is a steady drip of incremental adds year over year. ]

I'm talking about an unreleased product. My assumption is Apple will not allow internal upgrades of RAM or SSD even with those expansion slots.

I did not read the rest of your post because it's obsolete information for obsolete products.

 

[dtm84]

I don't know who needs to hear this. Based on the hubbub on multiple Mac news sites, I'm guessing many. Here are some facts based on knowns and unknowns regarding whatever machine Apple is going to replace the Mac Pro (2019) aka MacPro7,1 with:


1. The RAM will not be separately user-upgradeable; it will be tied to the SoC.

2. There will be no PCIe GPU nor eGPU upgradability or expansion; the only GPU will be the one on the SoC.

Before anyone challenges me with that, make sure you have watched this video from WWDC 2020 (where the Intel to Apple Silicon transition was first announced): https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10686/ (at about the 1-minute mark)

3. This doesn't mean that there's no point to a Mac tower with PCIe expansion; there are plenty of professionals that need broadcast cards or special video tuners or audio interface boards in their Mac Pro; these things are not the kinds of things you can solve with Thunderbolt 4 or a Thunderbolt 3/4 breakout box. It's just not practical.

4. There's nothing in the referenced video above that negates the notion that Apple could socket the SoC and/or make it user-upgradeable/replaceable. Those of you that have used or operated a 2009-2012 Mac Pro (aka MacPro4,1 or MacPro5,1) have seen a similar concept in the form of the processor tray and backplane. There's nothing stopping Apple from doing something similar here. That's not to say that SoC upgrades likely won't cost an arm and a leg. They probably will be very expensive (assuming Apple goes this route). But it will still be possible to upgrade RAM and graphics this way.

5. The internal SSD on a 2019 Mac Pro is already proprietary, requires a DFU restore of the T2 chip in order to replace the storage; modules become useless when removed from the Mac Pro they came from; this won't be different on an Apple Silicon Mac Pro replacement either. Furthermore, if the SoC is to be user-replaceable due to being socketed or on a processor tray, the internal storage will need to be wiped when performing an SoC replacement/upgrade. This is how Apple Silicon and T2 Mac Storage works. This has no bearing on SATA or PCIe SSDs; just storage controlled by the SoC.

6. The base model SoC offered for this new Mac Pro will most likely run rings around the least expensive Mac Pro (2019) MPX AMD video card option. This is a safe bet. Less safe of a bet, but still perfectly plausible, is that it also runs rings around the MOST expensive Mac Pro (2019) MPX AMD video card option. This won't fully soften the blow of having the GPU be tied to the SoC and not upgradeable separately from it, but it will soften it for a decent amount of Mac Pro customers.

7. Apple likely won't introduce a dual-socket Apple Silicon Mac, let alone Mac Pro. This isn't a guarantee, but given everything that they said about using two discrete SoCs when first unveiling the M1 Ultra shows that they'd rather take two SoCs and bridge them internally into one mega SoC than go the dual-socket route. They could introduce a totally different technology that makes this feasible for the Mac Pro, but this seems unlikely.

8. "M2 Extreme" may have been cancelled, but it is extremely unlikely that an M2 Ultra, born out of two M2 Max SoCs with "Ultra-Fusion" will be the only SoC going into the next Mac Pro. You can customize a Mac Pro (2019) with 1.5TB of RAM. I'm sure that very few Mac Pro customers do this, but I'm also sure that there are some that do. Apple may not replace the current Mac Pro with a Mac Pro that goes all the way to 1.5TB of RAM, but it's safe to assume that they'd at least try to get halfway there. At best, an M2 Ultra, born out of the highest end M2 Max SoC times 2 would only yield 192GB of RAM. I'm not saying that isn't a ton of RAM even still. But a far cry from even half of the current Mac Pro's maximum. Let's assume that M3 Max is able to offer 128GB of RAM (by virtue of M3 being able to go to 32GB of RAM from M2's maximum of 24GB - up from M1's 16GB). That still only gives M3 Ultra a maximum of 256GB. Apple is going to continue the Intel Mac Pro's tradition of offering an entirely different class of SoC unique to Mac Pro. That's not to say that a "Max" or "Ultra" SoC won't still be on offer. That's totally possible too. There are probably many folks that would be fine with a "Max" chip's performance, but needing PCIe slots for specialized cards. But, you'd probably also have folks that would need to go to Ultra before eventually building a Mac Pro with that next level tier.

9. No, Apple hasn't forgotten about the Pros. In 2019, they released two products that all but outright admitted that they messed up. One was the current Mac Pro. The other was the first and last Intel 16-inch MacBook Pro (the first Mac since the butterfly keyboard to not have a butterfly keyboard and to be thicker than its predecessor for the sake of better performance). They did these moves for Pros. We're not getting another trash can. The "Ultra" configuration of Mac Studio is not going to be the best high-end desktop Mac that Apple is going to offer. You won't see regular upgrades to the Mac Pro. And, per that video linked above (which is to say "per how Apple Silicon is fundamentally designed as a Macintosh hardware platform"), you will not have the level of easy aftermarket upgradeability you had with the 2019 (let alone 2009-2012) Mac Pro. But it ought to still be a decent upgrade and not a trash can upgrade.

What's your point?

 

[deconstruct60]

I maintain that for Apple to make the "M2/3 Extreme" work economically, they will have to create an Apple Silicon Cloud where businesses can rent a Mac Pro for hours at a time. This is in addition to selling a traditional Mac Pro workstation. https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...t-a-40-core-soc-for-mac-pro-now-what.2306486/

Why does Apple have to invest this business when others did it over a decade ago?

A History of Mac mini | MacStadium

We have a long-standing love of the Mac mini... take a walk down memory lane with us as we reflect back on 10+ years of the Mac mini.

www3.macstadium.com

MacStadium which also consumed/merged with Macminicolo so there has been around long enough for consolidation to start happening.

Amazon rents Macs.

Amazon EC2 Mac Instances - Amazon Web Services

Amazon EC2 Mac instances are built on Mac mini computers and feature the macOS operating system. Mac instances offer customers an efficient development environment by providing macOS with the benefits of AWS.

aws.amazon.com

Azure kind of thought about it but got 'cold feet'.

Microsoft-hosted agents for Azure Pipelines - Azure Pipelines

Learn about using the Microsoft-hosted agents provided in Azure Pipelines

learn.microsoft.com

there are several small players

HostMyApple: The #1 Provider of macOS Cloud Servers now with macOS Sequoia

With up to 64GB of RAM and the option to expand storage HostMyApple offers powerful and affordable Mac VPS cloud servers and dedicated Mac hosting, with no hardware to purchase! Mac Data Centers in Atlanta, Denver & Amsterdam.

www.hostmyapple.com

[ there were a few in Europe that I forget the names of. ]


Does Apple's XCode Cloud need some Mac Pro 'nodes' for some larger customers. Probably yes. But more generic cloud services on macOS for users sitting at a GUI ? Errrr. That really isn't what Apple is good at. [ XCode doesn't store the source code. Apple really isn't looking for any long term persistence storage there other than finished apps ready to be uploaded into the App Store. By default your code is suppose to be off in github (if I recall correctly). ]



Nor is Apple's macOS cloud licensing model really set up to the "low cost leader" in the market. It is mainly set up so that more Macs get sold, not so that the cheapest possible web services get offered. Those are two different things.

Does Apple need to 'Sherlock' the various hosting specialist that have been hefty consumers of product over the last decade to squeeze out some 'extra buck'? Not really. If they were all doing a really bad job then maybe. However, if more than a couple are already doing a good job for end users , then Apple's value add here is what? Putting them out of business and sucking up their revenue is decent from an Apple greed perspective , but it does what for the customers?

From a datacenter , multitenant perspective the current Mac Pro chassis is not all that good. Especially at single user hosting. The computational density is quite bad for the vast majority of users' workloads. There is a highly limited set of 'narrow corner case' users that might fit well , but building a larger business around that is a bit dubious. Such a relativily small pool of users that decent chance will end up in a "rob Peter to pay Paul" situation were kill out of cloud sales to boost in cloud sales. It isn't gong to 'grow the pie'.

 

[iPadified]

Does a Mac Pro make economic sense for Apple?

"Enthusiast" wants a modular Mac to buy cheap third party parts. No point to support that for Apple.

Configurability is another animal and there it gets interesting regarding SoCs. All assume the compute=GPU. Many wants CPU as well or dedicated engines for specific tasks. The equation is far from simple and breaks the SoC paradigm. What is cheapest? Parallelise Ultras or make dedicated chips for CPU, GPU, Raytracing and video encoders respectively? Probably the Ultras.

Next issue is that more and more tasks that previously required a Mac Pro is now done using a silent laptop. Is the high end Mac Pro market increasing or decreasing?

 

[sam_dean]

Does a Mac Pro make economic sense for Apple?

"Enthusiast" wants a modular Mac to buy cheap third party parts. No point to support that for Apple.

Configurability is another animal and there it gets interesting regarding SoCs. All assume the compute=GPU. Many wants CPU as well or dedicated engines for specific tasks. The equation is far from simple and breaks the SoC paradigm. What is cheapest? Parallelise Ultras or make dedicated chips for CPU, GPU, Raytracing and video encoders respectively? Probably the Ultras.

Next issue is that more and more tasks that previously required a Mac Pro is now done using a silent laptop. Is the high end Mac Pro market increasing or decreasing?

On top of that the Mac Studio does all the heavy lifting in a 3.7L volume.

This is the perfect Mac for me in 2002 as my use case never had me add any daughter boards.

 

[senttoschool]

Why does Apple have to invest this business when others did it over a decade ago?

Because only a Mac Mini is offered by AWS today? Because Apple can do direct macOS integration? Because Apple can better scale this business while others are literally buying physical Mac Minis and hooking them up? Because my dev team uses Mac Pros/Studios today to do builds in the office but we'd much rather allow our devs to easily hook up their Github account to an M3 Extreme and build much faster while they're sitting at home developing on an Air? Or Apple Cloud is directly integrated with Xcode and whenever you build, it automatically chooses a cloud instance from one that your company has setup for all developers?

My company has a real legitimate use case for something like this. It'd significantly increase productivity for us.

 

[sam_dean]

I am glad I am not a customer for the Mac Pro.

I do wonder... with the 3nm will the M3 Extreme (four M3 Max dies) be fitted into a Mac Studio?

I could imagine a M3 Ultra may be placed into a MBP 16" or even 14" provided that the TDP and waste heat are equal to a M2 Max.

 

[leman]

It seems to me that most potential customers could bee satisfied if a Mac Pro had the following properties:

— excellent performance and a wide range of configurations
— reliability: enterprise level SSDs, error—correcting RAM etc.
— limited upgradeability e.g. in form of a replaceable SoC board
— ability to install additional specialized hardware (PCIe cards)

Ability to use external GPUs is not an actual priority if the provided hardware is fast enough. Getting the chassis right and compatible with future iterations of Pro Apple Silicon seems to be key. Maybe even featuring a slower pool of slotted RAM a tier above the fast SoC RAM. At any rate not something one should rush into. Until a solid product can be developed Mac Studio is a reasonable placeholder.

 

[leman]

I could imagine a M3 Ultra may be placed into a MBP 16" or even 14" provided that the TDP and waste heat are equal to a M2 Max.

That’s not how Apple operates. They generally keep the thermal target the same, but aim to extract more performance from it. So I don’t believe M3 Ultra would consume less power than M1 Ultra. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it consumed more.

 

[sam_dean]

That’s not how Apple operates. They generally keep the thermal target the same, but aim to extract more performance from it. So I don’t believe M3 Ultra would consume less power than M1 Ultra. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it consumed more.

But it's gonna move from 5nm to 3nm... then within 5 years from 3nm to 2nm...

But then again you are right. Apple may increase cores, transistor counts and clock speeds.

So an Ultra remains an ultra but increase of everything.

SoC package will remain relatively the same length, width & height but densities would increase.

By 2033 will the transistor count of an iPhone chip be the same as M2 Ultra?

 

[leman]

But it's gonna move from 5nm to 3nm... then within 5 years from 3nm to 2nm...

But then again you are right. Apple may increase cores, transistor counts and clock speeds.

That’s how they operated until now at least.

By 2033 will the transistor count of an iPhone chip be the same as M2 Ultra?

Assuming transistors continue get smaller, why not? But there are considerable fears in the industry that we are running out of space. Just looking at price developments for TSMC nodes it is very possible that a 2033 iPhone chip will cost more than an M2 Ultra…

 

[Nathan King]

There are a lot of valid points here.

I'd like to add that the high-end workstation market is simply much smaller than it was before. Heavy workloads that could move to the cloud have moved to the cloud. This isn't 2010 anymore.

This is the exact situation I'm in. Almost every line of code I write compiles and runs on either AWS or an Oracle server. I own a fully loaded Studio Ultra, but I could do 90% of my job just as quickly on a base-model MacBook Pro. Only rarely do I need to spin up a fleet of VMs to test code locally, where that used to be the primary way I worked.

 

[Bug-Creator]

Assuming transistors continue get smaller, why not?

- always remember that 10/7/5/3nm are more about marketing then about actual size
- with memory cells they have already reached the point where decrease in "nm" does not make them smaller
- while smaller transistors do consume less power that is not linear

-> unless there is a completely new way of making CPU/GPUs we will see smaller and smaller increases in performance/watt pointing to but never reaching an absolute maximum.

 

[sam_dean]

- always remember that 10/7/5/3nm are more about marketing then about actual size
- with memory cells they have already reached the point where decrease in "nm" does not make them smaller
- while smaller transistors do consume less power that is not linear

-> unless there is a completely new way of making CPU/GPUs we will see smaller and smaller increases in performance/watt pointing to but never reaching an absolute maximum.

That's why I replace my devices after final Security Update is issued for

- macOS
- iOS
- iPadOS
- watchOS
- winOS

Before replacing so the jump in performance would be noticeable.

Like my jumping from 32nm or 22nm to 5nm.

 

[Joe Dohn]

Yes. Final Cut Pro has the advantage of Apple hardware. My current setup has the Afterburner card and cut my rendering time by more than half from the trash can.

I've heard reports of users in the film-making industry that Final Cut Pro was being neglected and that Da Vinci Resolve is actually better.

And guess what: Da Vinci Resolve IS cross-compatible.

 

[bombardier10]

Now the situation is clear . Apple is leaving the professional workstation market in favor of mobile devices. As a consolation is left Mac Studio de facto device also a bit "mobile". It will be expensive and forget about any possibility of
expansion of your computer...
The solution to this problem is simple. Professional users are moving to ..... PCs equipped with macOS. After all, it is the same thing only a few times cheaper and we can install graphics , memory drives all we want.
Here is our future machine no need to wait for any new Mac Pro.

 

[sam_dean]

Now the situation is clear . Apple is leaving the professional workstation market in favor of mobile devices. As a consolation is left Mac Studio de facto device also a bit "mobile". It will be expensive and forget about any possibility of
expansion of your computer...
The solution to this problem is simple. Professional users are moving to ..... PCs equipped with macOS. After all, it is the same thing only a few times cheaper and we can install graphics , memory drives all we want.
Here is our future machine no need to wait for any new Mac Pro.

There will come a time that macOS will drop Intel support.