There are no Pro Mac users. Anyone who is still on the Mac after well over a decade since the last remotely competitive workstation from Apple is here because they like MacOS and don't need truly high end performance. Apple hasn't even tried to offer an up to date, competitive tower since 2009/2010. However, in the meantime, even a Macbook Air can do things no 2010 and earlier workstation could do. And the truly pro world has moved almost completely to using render farms and cloud computing solutions, not high end workstations. Users left using the mac for work either do office type jobs that let them by their own hardware, audio, or some 2D art forms such as photo editing, some illustration type stuff, or small single editor video projects. Since even a macbook can do any/all photo and video work anyone would do on a mac, the MacPro exists mainly to cater to the remaining audio professionals. Those who have non-video PCIe cards, those for whom the M2Ultra is more than enough power for any imaginable workflow.
What you are saying is that they are justifying to decrease their own market by limiting the performance. Stop dreaming. Apple is just making less and yet you are praising whatever they do. Clearly, you dont know the Mac Pro 2013 crisis at all.
How does this seem like 2013? the real knock on the 2013 was the lack of expansion. This thing is expandable out the ass. SoCs are just better than discrete CPU, RAM and GPU. There is no way to overcome that. Given a much larger power and silicon budget you can brute force through the problem, but the SoC is becoming the new motherboard. To keep up with gains everything has to be direct silicon connected with super low latency and super high bandwidth. 2023 Mac Pro is leagues ahead of the 2019 in all CPU metrics, and can have more NVMe RAID storage, running theoretically faster than dual channel DDR4 in the 2019 Pro, using one or two PCIe slots (easily could have 32TB in RAID 0 with a theoretical 64GB/s throughput). The only place the 2023 falls behind is in GPU, but, again, no one doing actual 3D or heavy compute work still runs MacOS. Would it be nice if this machine tried to change that? sure, I guess. But did anyone honestly expect Apple to completely pull a 180 on a decade plus of highly successful erosion of the Mac's high end competitiveness?
If SoC is better, how come nobody is using SoC? How come the performance is way lower than what AMD, Intel, and Nvidia can offer especially without test results? Tell that to people using PC for the best performance that Mac cant even provide.
Actually there ARE people using Mac for heavy 3D before who worked for Disney. They even used Metal and Ray tracing for some animations. And yet, Apple is killing their own products so they had to ditch the Mac system. Now, who's fault is that?
The M2 Ultra is a lot more CPU than anything in the 2019 model. It does not keep up with Sapphire Rapids or the theortical Threadripper 7000 chips, which is lame. But those platforms hardly exist and the M2 Ultra will be competitive or ahead of the 7950x and 13900k.
Wrong, Apple Silicon is not even close to either Intel or AMD in terms of performance. Beside, Apple put M2 Ultra to Mac Pro which suppose to use Intel Xeon and AMD Threaripper or EPYC series. They support up to 128 cores or more. Where do you even find that 7950x and 13900k is enough for workstations? Comparing with 2019 era and consumer grade CPU to Mac Pro is already a joke.
It's $1000 more after 4 years, or inflation adjusted a flat price. For that, you get a much more powerful base configuration. 2019 Pro launched with an 8core Xeon, 32GB DDR4 RAM, and glorified RX580 GPU. 2023 launches with twice the RAM, with 20x the bandwidth. The new pro ships with 24 much faster cores, for likely 4x the CPU performance of the base 2019 pro. It ships with more TB ports, more open PCIe slots, the ability to drive more pixels and more displays, built in accelerators equivalent to 7 of the add on Afterburner card. To build a 2019 Pro up to the base specs of the 2023 Pro would cost $10s of thousands. Lack of extra GPU compute hurts, and is stupid. But in every other way, this MacPro demolishes the old one in value for money.
Such a poor excuses. It is well known that Mac is overpriced for many aspects including Mac Pro. With those specs, HP's workstation starts from $3000~$4000. Beside, it has way more features than Mac Pro 2023 can provide. I have to laugh since when M2 Ultra is faster than workstation CPU with way more cores. And you just admitted that lack of GPU hurts and it hurts so badly. Now, you didnt even mentioned the GPU problem which means you aware the problem with GPU pretty well.
NVMe, SATA, Audio interfaces, Video capture cards, networking adpaters. Cards with future I/O standards (USB 5 or 6, next gen thunderbolt? etc.) There are tons of options. All my old PowerMacs and MacPros run out of PCIe slots by the time they are about 5 years old, so many new standards have come out and can be added for a couple hundred bucks or less rather than by buying a whole new tower.
That's totally normal and standard for computers with PCIe slots. You are not admitting the issue that Mac Pro 2023 can NOT use any external GPU at all which defeats the main purpose of Mac Pro.
It took you until now to see that Apple doesn't care about workstations? They made that clear around 2010. And have never pretended to do anything other than provide slightly soft cushions along the glide path ever since. Apple wants customers who buy high volume products like a new fully loaded MacBook Pro or iPhone regularly. It's not worth it to chase the tiny fraction of people who want higher end hardware but just won't leave the mac. Even if they priced the MacPro competitively, at Studio pricing or lower, and added back full GPU support for some reason, these would sell in the hundreds or thousands not in the millions of tens of millions. They charge a lot to recoup RnD costs and discourage people who want this type of hardware from sticking with the Mac.
The company is ready to reconcile with pros
www.theverge.com
Mac Pro 2019 prove your theory wrong. When Mac Pro 2013 was a huge failure, they admitted it's their fault to ditch the pro market. If they didnt care, how come they made a better workstation in 2019? Why not keep using Mac Pro 2013? Loosing the pro market is making a bad decision again just like they did from 2013 to 2019. All you are saying is that workstation is not profitable and yet, many companies such as Nvidia proves you wrong. Now, do you even wish FCPX editors to ditch Mac system?
Overall, you are justifying the Apple's action by all mean necessary just like Apple did with Mac Pro 2013 and it turns out to be a huge mess. Making a same mistake huh? Now I'm seeing the fall of Mac system starting with Mac Pro 2023 as they can not make a powerful chip to replace workstation/server grade CPU and GPU and I'm sick of it to see people praising how Apple treat pro users. Even now, Apple Silicon's performance only focus on power by watt, not performance itself especially toward GPU. Is this why Apple stopped comparing their chips to Nvidia instead of 4 years old Intel Mac? Such a pity.
It is such a disappointing period of time as Apple dont care about the pro market again and their SoC is too limited that they cant even compete with Nvidia or AMD in terms of GPU performance. Anyone who still arguing that Apple is doing fine, you are clearly ignoring the problem. It's just worse than before.
