The future direction of the Mac Pro really has me wondering. I just rewatched the WWDC 2019 keynote where they announced the Mac Pro, and the WWDC 2020 keynote where they announced Apple Silicon.
It just makes no sense for them to say “we’re bringing back PCIe slots to the Mac” in 2019 when every Apple employee on stage knew that Apple Silicon was coming one year later.
The Mac Pro announcement was clearly aimed at the needs of Hollywood-level industries with multimillion dollar budgets and infinite performance needs. They bragged about how you could put two Vega II Duo cards inside for 4 GPUs, or 6 Avid HDX audio interface cards. The Pro Display XDR was also compared directly against $43,000 professional reference monitors used in Hollywood. They bent over backwards to show how committed they were to keeping the business of the highest end entertainment industry customers.
If they didn’t want to continue down that expandability road knowing the Apple Silicon transition was coming a year later, they could have just released the Mac Studio instead, back in 2018 or 2019. Match the specs of the iMac Pro in a large Mac Mini case. Xeon CPU plus integrated Vega 64 GPU, up to 128 or 256GB of RAM, lots of Thunderbolt 3 ports for expansion, it would have been the natural heir to the 2013 Mac Pro. No new Mac had featured *any* real PCIe card slots or 12! RAM slots since 2012. It wouldn’t have surprised anyone back then if they released a Mac Studio type product and called it the 2019 Mac Pro. That would have given them a very smooth transition to today’s Apple Silicon with no expectations of multiple AMD GPUs on cards and gobs of RAM. But they didn’t do that, even though it was obvious thing.
What did surprise everyone is how hard they doubled down on the expandability story for the Mac Pro. They never once talked about “performance per watt”, rather they bragged about the “1.4 kilowatt” power supply. After they made such a bold statement in 2019 about how expandable, powerful, and expensive the Mac Pro was going to be in their product lineup, I really can’t see them changing directions again after the Apple Silicon announcement a year later.
Especially now after the release of the Mac Studio, they’ve already satisfied the computing needs of 99% of their “pro” customers. Mac users are complaining about them not offering more midrange M1 Pro computers in their lineup, more than complaining about a lack of powerful options on the high end. Plenty of people are happy with the M1 Max and don’t even think they need the M1 Ultra.
Who’s left to buy a new Mac Pro then? To even justify its existence, and to please the Hollywood-level customers they clearly stated they were targeting in 2019, it’s going to have to continue on the 2019 trajectory of eyeball-melting 3D rendering performance and insane configurability, power bills be damned. They continue to release new MPX GPUs even this month. They’ve got to release something that would make Pixar happy, the people at the extreme end of “technology meeting the liberal arts.”
I’d guess it’s more likely they would release an updated Intel Mac Pro with next-generation Xeon CPUs and retain all the extreme expansion abilities they promoted, rather than reduce the amount of PCIe, RAM, and GPU expansion options in order to migrate the Mac Pro if it would be limited by current Apple Silicon. The 2019 Mac Pro was all about giving Hollywood what it wanted, and that’s the customer they have to continue to please and delight with any new Mac Pro as well. If the new Mac Pro won’t fit those 6 Avid audio interface cards they promoted, I don’t think the current extreme high-end Mac Pro customer base they just courted would consider it an upgrade.
If we get the Jade 4C dual M1 Ultra in the next Mac Pro, that should at least be able to support those 6 Avid HDX cards (PCIe x4). M1 Ultra has 6 Thunderbolt controllers so a dual M1 Ultra should have 12? That should be able to at least support 6 internal PCIe 3.0 x4 slots and 6 external Thunderbolt ports.
Whether a dual M1 Ultra plus some other secret sauce could scale up to handle the four x16, three x8, one x4 PCIe slots, plus the 1.5TB of RAM of the current Mac Pro, I don’t know. Maybe the Apple Silicon Mac Pro is the “half size Mac Pro” we heard about, and they retain a full size upgraded Intel Xeon option as well to please the most demanding customers.
But they knew where they were heading in 2019 when they announced the expandable Mac Pro, and so I really can’t see any other option but fully matching and exceeding those abilities with the next Pro.
