I didn't say anything about Mac studio or am I missing some sort of attempt at humor?
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MP 14,8 Mac Pro 2023 is a scam
- Thread starter Xenobius
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Agree with that point (and your point about warranty too). That said, once you adjust for that, even those that sell consumer/gamer systems as systems with a warranty, the price comparison is very ugly with the 8,1 Mac, IMO.
No, it wouldn't. I am an actual human being, so I do make mistakes and get things wrong. I hope you don't think you're somehow above this where you don't get anything wrong?
According to your argument the Mac Studio Ultra meets the needs of all but a very minuscule minority of potential Mac Pro buyers.
IMO people who need the ability to upgrade or use a higher performance GPU far exceeds those who need PCIe slots and don't need to utilize a different GPU. IOW they're focusing on the wrong demographic.
I don't think that makes sense. If the Mac Studio fit fit their needs, then they wouldn't be potential Mac Pro buyers. They would be potential Mac Studio buyers. I think potential Mac Pro buyers know exactly what they need and it wouldn't be the Mac Studio. I think this is a small group of people that are buying this high-end machine for specific tasks
That is a possibility. I honestly don't know what percentage of people buying a Mac Pro need more GPU power than the M2 Ultra has. I suspect Apple has researched this and determined what their customers are doing with the existing Mac Pros. At least I hope so but like everything in the form, it's kind of speculation
They are (or were) Mac Pro buyers because the Mac Pro offered more than the Mac Studio did. Now the Mac Pro, aside from some PCIe slots and a little more port expansion capability, is essentially a Mac Studio.
Honestly I do not even know why this product exits. Apple appears to have abandoned the one segment, i.e those who need a powerful GPU, for what...audio professionals and those who need a lot of internal fast storage?
I can't imagine those who can utilize the new Mac Pros PCIe slots outnumbering those who would utilize a more powerful GPU. This seems to be nothing more than a slot box that costs as additional $3K to get those slots.
Apple launched the Mac Pro just to shut people up about when the new ARM Mac Pro would come.
It is not silly. If you need performance, why run it on a slow OS like MacOS?
Linux is faster than Mac OS in the end, so better switch to Linux.
Except if you do music production, but a 16” MBP or Mac Studio is sufficient for that too, unless you use those overpriced PCE-i DSP accelator cards.
It is not silly. If you need performance, why run it on a slow OS like MacOS?
Linux is faster than Mac OS in the end, so better switch to Linux.
Except if you do music production, but a 16” MBP or Mac Studio is sufficient for that too, unless you use those overpriced PCE-i DSP accelator cards.
You read my mind @russell_314. A recurring question after reading many of these highly opinionated, but ultimately speculative posts is:
”Are you seriously considering a MacPro purchase? Or just opining based on your beliefs/preferences regarding what a MacPro should offer?“
I‘m really curious about what actual MacPro buyers think, but unfortunately that is not evident from this thread. 🤔
Why not go to the Mac Pro forum and ask? Oh, wait...
Unfortunately it seems as if this thread (hopefully not the whole mac pro forum) is being infiltrated by apple fanboys who have no interest in the mac pro other than to attack posters in this sub because they are butthurt that working professionals see computers as tools rather than objects to salivate over and reinforce their identity.
Thanks for the helpful perspective @goMac. Are you one of those affected individuals (need ECC, need higher-end graphics than AS provides, have higher RAM workflows than AS supports)?
Because it's a clown show masquerading as a tech channel.
They demonstrate again and again that they don't understand what they're talking about. They're a living breathing Dunning-Kruger demo. Anyone willing to be that wrong with that much confidence is a menace.
- Generation 2 ASi Mac Pro
- 3nm process / A17-based cores
- M3 Ultra / M3 Extreme SoCs
- Hardware Ray-Tracing
- ECC LPDDR5X RAM
- PCIe 5.0
- ASi GPGPUs
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I’m curious @m1maverick, were you planning to purchase the MacPro, but changed your mind after the reveal?
Well, John Ternus answers your question of “why this Mac Pro at all?” @ the 21:30 minute point in his WWDC Talk Show interview with John Gruber:
Question: What are the use cases for the MacPro vs MacStudio Ultra?
Answer:
(1) Massive High Speed Storage on PCI,
(2) Fast networking requiring custom networking cards,
(3) Plug-and-play for those who’ve built PCI infrastructure and workflows around PCI and PCI cards and
(4) Users with embedded MacPro Rack Configurations
Don't know if that matters in this debate, but that is Apple’s story.
I don't need ECC. I do need higher end graphics, and I do have higher-than-normal RAM usage. Not 1.5 TB of memory, but up at the higher end of what M2 Ultra can do.
I don't know what I'm going to do, but at this time the Mac Pro isn't a sensible option for me. I've basically been forced down into a Mac Studio if I keep buying Macs - which was an option I was trying to avoid.
And the price for performance is seriously misaligned. On both the Studio and Pro.
If the GPU performance was better I might have tried to justify it. But it's just not a starting-at-$7000 machine. (And the Studio prices are too high too.)
I have to say, I find the 2023 MP a head scratcher on a number of levels and this answer really didn't help me.
I understand why it doesn't have expandable RAM to the extent that the 2019 does. Unified memory is foundational to Apple Silicon and I couldn't imagine them breaking that architecture for one product in the line.
But as others have said, it's basically a PCIe expander for the MacStudio and one that can't make use of the GPU cards that it seems a lot people around here go on about.
By the same token, I can't imagine Apple just built a machine thinking it would sell without knowing who their target customers were. Then they gave this list of target customers and I guess I just can't figure out who this describes. Are there enough of these folks around to justify the product?
Beyond PCI though, there's not much to tout-- processing speeds are the same as Studio, memory depth is the same, it doesn't give an ECC memory option for the folks that rely on that... Just PCIe.
And if that's all this was ever going to be, what took so long? I can only assume the botched the PCIe interface on the M1 ultra and were forced to wait a generation to fix it.
Is there anyone on this forum that falls into one of the 4 categories listed above? What do you do?
Here's the problem you cant have 1 and 2 or 1 and 3 together because one storage card takes all the lanes and nothing is left for the others. It's a machine with 7 slots, the use of one of which leaves nothing for the other remaining slots. It's a sad joke.
Thanks for the explanation. I can see your dilemma and the uncomfortable choices you are being forced to make. I have no basis for this other than faith in Apple not to just phone it in on a product like the MacPro, but I believe there’s a lot more to the MacPro than has been announced. I wish you luck @goMac 🙏🏽
The Asahi Linux people have done a pretty through look through and they have PCIe attributed down to the individual component.
Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems)
Yeah okay so they are totally cheating. They have two big PCIe switches and are hanging everything off of them. From the device tree: # 8x Gen4 lanes on die 0, switched: - x1 to USB internal - x2 to SATA internal - x4 to I/O card (USB, probably single lane connected) - x8 to slot6 - x1 to...social.treehouse.systems
Sure, maybe something at the last minute changes, but it seems like pretty solid work to me.
Edit: Looking at it, there is one clarification: another 8x is routed directly to slot 6. What's in slot 6? Is that another IO card?
Wow, just wow. So slots 1-5, which includes both 16x slots, are all hanging off a single 16x PCIe v4 bus. By comparison, an Intel i5-13600 has 20 v4 lanes for its slots, and something more serious like a 16-core Xeon w5-3435X has 112 lanes - of PCIe v5.
The fact is, the ASi Mac Pro is not some carefully calibrated design, specifically addressing a section of the market that Apple has identified. It's a machine that has been bodged together from existing parts. Apple have done what was long speculated about here and elsewhere, but dismissed on the grounds of 'surely they wouldn't'.
The only question is whether this is an emergency release, like the G4 'Yikes', or whether it represents the new normal. For now at least, it represents the worst fears of Mac Pro users when Apple announced the transition to an SoC-based architecture - it would be great for laptops, but totally ill-suited to expandable desktops.
Apple were fully aware of the consequences of going down the ASi route, and did it anyway. I'm sure they have no regrets. It does mean, though, that the combination of Mac Studio and 8,1 Mac Pro ("Mac Studio+") is essentially the best they can do at the high end. I'm sure they don't want to lose customers there, but the goals of ASi are more important - unifying everything they make around the same architecture.
Obviously, any computer they might make will find some delighted owners. The 2013 MP was loved by some. But if you have high-end needs - or even just want a half decent graphics card - your attachment to macOS is being strained to breaking point. It's one thing paying over the odds to get what you want, it's quite another paying over the odds to get something you don't.
From another thread:
Apple M2 Ultra SoC Isn't Faster Than AMD & Intel Last Year Desktop CPUs, 50% Slower Than NVIDIA RTX 4080
Apple's M2 Ultra SoC is being benchmarked right and left and we can compare those numbers to AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA chips.wccftech.com
Another wow. So basically, a 13900K + RTX4070 desktop PC would beat the M2 Ultra MP for ST, almost match it for MT, and spank it for GPU compute. And of course, have more PCIe lanes, have an upgradeable GPU - and even the option of ECC for those that want it. The only deficit would be the 128GB RAM ceiling. And their electricity bill.
Bit late to this party, but I wouldn't disagree with anything in that video (and I'm not a Max Tech fan - I generally find him hyperbolic).
Either the 2023 MP was an emergency release to get the transition done (and speed up the clock on Intel macOS), with the main course eventually coming with the M3 Extreme version. Or Apple truly have decided to exit the workstation market, and are using the price-increased, half-assed 2023 MP to give a very clear hint that folks should buy a Mac Studio Ultra or a Windows / Linux PC. In the latter case, perhaps it's also there to ween folks with an investment in PCIe cards on to ASi, then going forward, will Apple will encourage them to invest in TB kit instead - before dropping the MP completely. Having made a big fuss in 2017 about expansion, they were likely reluctant to drop the 2019 chassis after one generation; this provides a more gentle, face-saving off-ramp.
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