Segmentation. This studio lineup will probably stay the same for quite a wihle imo. Margins on the Mac Pro are definitely higher and they will maintain that and possibly increase them.If Apple have a supply of M5 Ultra Chips ready for the Mac Pro this year - why wouldn't they also offer this as an Additional upgrade tier in the Mac Studio for a price that is between the M3 Ultra Studio and the base price of the Mac Pro M5 Ultra? Say $1000 less than the Mac Pro?
This is already the case with releases from M1 Max -> present. If you don’t need more than 128GB of memory and you can afford upgrading often the 16” MBP makes the most sense, at least with the historical cadence. That calculus could change with a desktop-exclusive SoIC which might be worth waiting for depending on your use case.If Apple don't also offer the M5 Ultra in the Mac Studio in 2025 ... It will likely result in customers Waiting until Apple release the Studio with M5 before they buy .. or, for many to consider switching from last-in-line desktops with two generation old architecture technology to the yearly state of the art Macbooks (with Max chips) that Apple releases like clock work in Q4 each year.
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I don’t know why some people are assuming these hypothetical many-core processors will ever ship outside Apple, they have no software that will leverage it. Apple is not publicly in the server market and it would be shocking to see them enter it, especially anytime soon given how abysmal their OS software execution has been lately. We will get something cool, configuration-wise if the wafer improvements are true but it’s a stretch to think they’d ship an ultra-high core count CPU. More P-cores and less E-cores are quite likely, though which will be a big boost.
Not being stuck offering multiples of redundant components like the media engines (the use case for more than 8 8k streams is probably nearly zero for example) being removed will save cost, power, and free up room to put something else interesting there. That’s where I see this headed, particularly with the neural and GPU cores.