Cloud is great when your loads are highly variable, as you are flexible in scaling up and down. It's a poor deal when they aren't.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Mac Pro 2023 = Another Mac Pro 2013 crisis and failure.
- Thread starter sunny5
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Cloud is great when your loads are highly variable, as you are flexible in scaling up and down. It's a poor deal when they aren't.
Why buy anything to own physically, when you can just pay more over it's lifespan to have something that can be taken away with little notice? Great deal.
The only Mac Pro that this machine isn't a complete across-the-board upgrade to is the 2019 Mac Pro. The only way in which this machine isn't a complete across-the-board upgrade to all other non-2019 Mac Pros is in terms of aftermarket RAM expansion (which was never going to happen due to the RAM being intrinsically tied to the rest of the SoC) and aftermarket GPU upgrades (which was also never going to happen due to RAM being intrinscally tied to the rest of the SoC). The only way Apple could've improved on this for the Mac Pro was to make the SoC socketed. Past that, and the kind of aftermarket expansion to RAM and GPUs that we had in the Intel and PowerPC days of Mac towers are behind us and that's by Apple's design.
I am disappointed that:
1. Apple didn't socket the SoC for aftermarket GPU/RAM changes
2. The Maximum RAM cieling is 1/8-1/4 what its predecessor had
3. There is a $3000 cost difference between any configuration of M2 Ultra Mac Studio and that same configuration of M2 Ultra Mac Pro
Everything else, I expected because I paid attention to Apple when they first went over Apple Silicon's overall system architecture design when it was first discused (by Apple) at WWDC 2020. I can only imagine that those truly surprised and/or disappointed by everything other than my three bullet points above didn't pay attention to that and/or were in some kind of denial.
I am disappointed that:
1. Apple didn't socket the SoC for aftermarket GPU/RAM changes
2. The Maximum RAM cieling is 1/8-1/4 what its predecessor had
3. There is a $3000 cost difference between any configuration of M2 Ultra Mac Studio and that same configuration of M2 Ultra Mac Pro
Everything else, I expected because I paid attention to Apple when they first went over Apple Silicon's overall system architecture design when it was first discused (by Apple) at WWDC 2020. I can only imagine that those truly surprised and/or disappointed by everything other than my three bullet points above didn't pay attention to that and/or were in some kind of denial.
Yeah I am sure syncing TB and TB of video data to the cloud will be super fun so you can use said "Cloud" GPU to get your work done.
"Cloud" just isn't practical for certain workflows.
THe only real difference is that the Mac Pr has PCI slots. The people who need these slots were never going to put GPUs in them. That's a gamer thing. The people who really need these PCI slots will place Black Magic Vidio input cars and some high-end audio cards ue maybe some fiber-optic networking cards in the slots. without these cards the users can't access the media they work with
People complain that the MP's PCI is "4" and not "5" but the cards these people are using don't have "5" versions.
For the vast majority, the Mac Studio is the best deal. The only reason to buy a Mac Pro is if you office is wired with a legacy fiber network or some other connectivity issue like that.
What we don't see here is a real person saying "I can't use the Mac because the GPU is too slow. Very few people have use for a GPU faster then what is o the M2 Ultra.
There are a whole marked for people that needs more GPU power but Apple doesn't seem interested in it. Too bad really cause I think if the next MP is just is getting a small refresh with M3 and maybe some more ram it's going to be the last one.
https://www.theverge.com/23770770/apple-mac-pro-m2-ultra-2023-review - Worth reading to get some more insight on the state of the current Mac Pro.
There are a lot of factors in play here, all of which are important. The modularity concern is certainly one of them. lack of software availability and culture of Mac use in that space another one. I think Apple can do quite well in this marked over time if they continue pushing their designs further. For this market, it would also be interesting to have a replaceable compute board/module to enable upgradeability. At any rate, this will take a couple of years at least, these kind of chances are slow.
Although I must say that Lebensfeld's comment about pricing doesn't make much sense to me. Comparable Xeon/Threadripper will costs roughly $3k USD. Comparable GPU is also $3-4k USD. Upgrading a PC workstation is hardly any cheaper than buying a whole new Mac Pro. For its capabilities, the Mac Pro is rather competitively priced (similar PC workstation costs $9-10k). Of course, PC workstation can be configured with more powerful hardware if that's what you need, the Mac Pro only really offers the "entry-level" device as far as workstations go.
Yes and no. GPGPU is a thing that exists, including for Apple (Metal Compute). What's less clear is whether that's a market Apple seems for themselves. It's just too much at odds with their architecture, at least as far as current SoCs are concerned.
There is a very narrow group of Mac Pro users, who needed dGPU for 3D rendering and animation and equally narrow group of users in scientific research who needed huge amount of ECC Ram.
Apple unfortunately decided to ignore those users with new Mac Pro.
Other than those guys, everyone else is more than happy with iGPUs within Apple Silicon SOCs
Apple unfortunately decided to ignore those users with new Mac Pro.
Other than those guys, everyone else is more than happy with iGPUs within Apple Silicon SOCs
Apple is heavily investing in the 3D rendering market, for example Sonoma adds support for raytraced curves. The hardware is not quite there yet, because it lacks RT acceleration, but if you look at raw compute, Apple is already competitive with the other vendors. I do hope that future updates will bring quad Max die configurations and possibly replaceable SoC boards.
Scientific research is a different market altogether that needs fairly niche stuff, I don't think it would make much sense for Apple to go for it...
Yes, M3 might bring HW RT, we shall see…
Apple definitely is interested in 3D (they are helping with Blender optimisation, after all). They are just doing it their own way (as always).
I don’t have a horse in this race - for music production, Mac Studio is more than enough.
M3 Ultra & M3 Extreme should bring some needed GPU boosts...
N3X, A18 cores, hardware ray-tracing, higher GPU core counts, faster clocks...
This should all result in parity with the performance of one (M3 Ultra) or two (M3 Extreme) high-end AMD/Nvidia GPUs (8900/5090), and Apple silicon GPGPUs could provide compute/render power equal to up to (assuming two Duo cards) four of the aforementioned AMD/Nvidia cards...
Fingers crossed...! ;^p
N3X, A18 cores, hardware ray-tracing, higher GPU core counts, faster clocks...
This should all result in parity with the performance of one (M3 Ultra) or two (M3 Extreme) high-end AMD/Nvidia GPUs (8900/5090), and Apple silicon GPGPUs could provide compute/render power equal to up to (assuming two Duo cards) four of the aforementioned AMD/Nvidia cards...
Fingers crossed...! ;^p
Apple doesn’t have to be king of the hill to win. Not sure why Apple must have a AMD/nVidia GPU killer.
Apple will just aim for what they think they need. They will not be able to satisfy everyone’s needs.
Apple has the ability to buy years of production from Suppliers and manufacturing Partners, and are Trend-Setters at times, which makes them a Big-Ticket Customer.
Yes it is a marketing trick because renting is always more expensive than owning on your own.
For example, you can rent an electric scooter but for three months of use you will pay as much as for a new one in the store . You can also borrow an entire mac with similar results
Yes it is a marketing trick because renting is always more expensive than owning on your own.
For example, you can rent an electric scooter but for three months of use you will pay as much as for a new one in the store . You can also borrow an entire mac with similar results
It really depends on what you want to do. If you need to train ML models, cloud can be much cheaper. One hour of training using the new Nvidia H100 GPU costs $2 at Lambda. That GPU alone costs over $40000 (if you are even able to find it in retail) — not to mention the rest of the system costs and operational expenses etc. You need to have some very serious computational needs to justify building a system like that. For most groups, cloud is a much better option, especially since it's a fire and forget solution that does not need any maintenance.
True, but more to the point, why buy a $1599 dGPU when you can rent a $30,000 dGPU from the cloud...?
First, because the GPU you buy is superseded 6 months after you buy it, plus - if you are in business - there are tax advantages to renting/subscribing/leasing rather than buying. Then, as I said above, you don't rent a cheap prosumer-grade gaming GPU off the cloud, you rent time on serious specialist kit that you couldn't necessarily afford to buy & run.
Well, there's the slight technical issue that the M2 Ultra only has 16 PCIe lanes available, so a decent dGPU would soak up all of them and leave nothing for all the other things MP buyers use PCIe slots for.
Then - even if Apple solved that there's the "what for?" - for GPU-heavy applications, a Mac with a (say) 4090 is going to be about as good as a cheaper x86 tower with a 4090 and is going to get its clock cleaned by a Threadripper with six 4090s, let alone the sort of exotic kit that @leman was talking about which you can rent in the cloud.
Also, what Apple really need is pro software optimised for Apple Silicon that can also be used on MacBook Pros and Studios, and that takes advantage of the tightly integrated SoC, unified RAM etc. Simply making it easier to use existing AMD/NVIDIA optimised software won't encourage that.
The M2 Ultra Studio and the 2023 Mac Pro are what Apple can build using the Mx Max dies they already have, which are perfect for most of the Mac range where - thanks to the advantages of the SoC design - they outperform competing systems of comparable size and power consumption. Anything beyond that and they'd have to invest shedloads of cash in new "workstation class" dies chucking away the advantages of the SoC approach in favour of external, ECC RAM and huge numbers of PCIe lanes - playing catchup with Intel, AMD and NVIDIA. Then they'd have to recoup that money from the tiny niche-of-a-niche - which is likely to be shrinking: as lower-end workstations are being replaced by increasingly powerful SFF systems and laptops and high-end systems, and higher-end systems move into the cloud.
...false analogy. First, you're talking about using a short-term rental service for long-term use. Go and talk about leasing a scooter long term and you'd expect to get a better deal - probably one that gets you a shiny new latest model scooter every year or two. There are all sorts of financial reasons why businesses often choose to lease kit (with bundled service, support, upgrades and replacements) rather than buy it outright. It can even make sense for individuals to lease cars if they want to replace them every couple of years (and if you're talking about computing kit which will be outdated after 18 months then, yes, you probably want that).
Second, rent a scooter for three months and you're paying to have it sit, unused, in your garage for 22 hours a day. What you want to do is rent it for the 2 hours a day that you're using it and give it back in-between. Difficult with a physical object (unless you don't mind walking to a pick-up point, chewing gum stuck to the handle bars etc.) - trivial with a cloud service, especially one operating on a national or even global scale.
Then by all means buy the hardware equivalent of what you're renting in the cloud - doesn't have to be Mac, you've pretty much proved that by using the cloud to start with - and, pretty soon, others will follow suit and the cloud provider will have to re-think their prices. However, I strongly suspect that the true 'total cost of ownership' of the hardware won't be so attractive - and we're talking about business use where things like support/replacement/service contracts are a necessity. Also, don't forget to allow for the difference between the $1-2k computer you need as a cloud client and the $5-7k+ computer you need to run a high0end GPU.
...but also remember we're talking about a likely future trend towards laptops/SFF clients + cloud and whether it's worth Apple making a huge investment in developing a "workstation class" version of Apple Silicon for a market which is being eroded by powerful laptops/SFFs at one end and increasingly mainframe-like cloud/datacentre kit at the other.
I have no idea what you talking about? Doesn’t make any sense. I use both cloud (for training) and workstation(non mac) and MBP. Cloud is great for training, because my workload is inconsistent, I don’t need to buy expensive Nvidia h100 or what ever the latest high end GPU. I scale up and down, cloud is economical. For inference I use 4090 , which can cost like 700 bucks a month to rent. You can recover the cost in 2-3 months and the contracts for service and warranty are nothing compared to cloud costs.
Bottom line if you have inconsistent workloads, cloud provides ability to scale up and down as needed. If you have consistent work load, just buy.
Isn't the cloud a bit of a red herring in this discussion? You can work on a MacBook Air if your main computational needs are outsourced to the cloud, but the Mac Pro is designed for people who need (or just want) that power on the desktop. GPUs are clearly something people want in their PCs as they sell a heck of a lot of them to people who aren't cloud service providers.
I don't think the Mac Pro is a disaster btw, it's just reflective of a narrowing of the focus of Apple's technology towards consumers and the many groups of professionals who don't have somewhat esoteric needs.
I don't think the Mac Pro is a disaster btw, it's just reflective of a narrowing of the focus of Apple's technology towards consumers and the many groups of professionals who don't have somewhat esoteric needs.
No, I think "I only have high-performance needs every now and then, so renting is cheaper than buying outright" is a valid choice.
Definitely true! For any prolonged work, a local machine is going to be cheaper than the cloud, and people need those machines to do what they want. I don't really need a dGPU for my work or extra sound processing, but other things I do need, like RAM and good performance requires me to buy high end machines, and there's no possible way I could afford my constant workflow in the cloud, even if it were as reliable as local. (which it's not)
I'm a little dissapointed just because of the past usage for a Mac Pro, but disaster, no. My only real desire that they would have sold it cheaper than the old version, since it is less expandable and it would compete with WIndows PC's in the market better. I might have even bought one because the performance and RAM are perfect for what I need. I might not have to have so many machines sitting around me to do what I want. As the price is now, I can get better performance for cheaper.
The expandability does make it a smart buy for those that its work flow fits.