Yes, and that is annoying.Note: MacRumors is re-posting an older thread, so most of the posts before this were from a year ago.
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Mac Studio vs. Mac Pro Buyer's Guide
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This is a beautiful example at how the new Mac Pro and Mac Studio M2 aren't for you.
I say that with a smile.
I would imagine there are one or two jobs you can do without PCI cards.
I guess there's no PCIe GPU support. Wonder if you could at least do compute-only to make it CUDA compatible.
two x16 (full height), four x8 (2 full, 2 half height), and the occupied x4 "apple i/o" card slot
I think Apple wants to kill the mac pro what better way of doing it than by limiting its pcie expansions to basically sound cards and storage, no upgradable ram, no GPU support and a high price tag for the basic configuration. For the same basic mac pro config you can get a mac studio with 192gb ram 2tb ssd and an external thunderbolt audio interface. The whole mac pro keynote presentation lasted about 2 min 20 sec.. what a joke
With Apple just now upgrading the Studio and Pro models to M2, I think that means we’re probably AT LEAST a year from M3. They definitely won’t sell any M3 machines before the end of the year or risk killing the sales of the new 15 inch Air. If I had to guess I would say that M3 will be introduced at next year’s WWDC and wouldn’t rule out an autumn of 2024 release date.
how much longer did it need to take? we’re putting an M2 Ultra into a MP with PCIe expansion… thats the headline and the story right there… If this is what your workflow needs then you’ll buy it, if not buy the M2 Mac Studio… its that simple…
If they wanted to kill the Mac Pro, they would have just never released it and announced via a Press Release on Tuesday that they had decided the Mac Pro was "no longer a product in our lineup" and media enquiries about the decision would have been responded with "did you see the new M2 Mac Studio we launched yesterday? It's our most powerful Mac ever!"
Yes, with a caveat: for our specific use case I described (HPC number-crunching on a large dataset that benefits from massive amounts of RAM), yes, the new AS Mac Pro would not be sufficient due simply to the maximum memory available. If there were no other options, something tricky could probably be done using the onboard high-speed storage in conjunction with the extremely high speed memory to get decent performance, but it's easier to just get commodity Linux hardware and throw vast amounts of RAM at the problem.
The caveat is that, although we have two older Mac Pros (trash can and the one prior) that we bought and used for this specific case in the past, we did not get one of the recent Intel ones (even when new and a pretty good deal compared to Dell options), but rather opted for DIY commodity hardware running Linux. So we hadn't opted for the Mac Pro even when it did suit our needs.
This isn't to say that there weren't people with similar needs who were using the previous generation of Mac Pro for this sort of use case, but given the direction HPC has taken I wonder how much of that market remained--I suspect (without more than anecdotal evidence) that very few people bought Mac Pros for that use case, even when they were suitable and not a bad deal.
The other non-studio-workflow use case I outlined, which would be absolutely ridiculous GPU power used for GPU computing, could at least in theory still be an option with the current design (although in practice that depends on whether there's a way to get a 3rd party GPU to work with it, or if your task optimizes extremely well for the GPU compute capability of the M2 Ultra), so long as the use case doesn't also require extremely large amounts of RAM.
It's more like a slow kill. They did it before with Apple Airport routers, iPod and iPod touch, iMac 27 inch.. I remember the iMac Pro 27 inch launch, it was huge then they killed the product.
Real professionals with a large array of live audio and video inputs need the lower latency and higher bandwidth of PCIe. Regular users who don't have a facility full of cameras and microphones (etc.) that cost far more than a Mac Pro or two, can get by with a Mac Studio for their lesser IO needs.
I started liking some of the posts on the first page of this thread without realizing they are from last year.
It's either intentional that they launched a product nobody will buy to boost Studio sales or an embarrassing moment spurred by supply chain problems, engineering difficulties they haven't yet solved, or bad management decisions.
Thank you for the detailed answer. Makes me wonder even more who, outside of Disney and Pixar, would find this to be their best option. Makes me kind of wonder who Apple thinks is their target market.
What is "massive amounts of RAM" in this case? I ask just out of curiosity because I kind of thought the Mac Pro got there at 192gb (and very fast RAM at that).
Who will buy it ? It's not future proof, can't upgrade cpu to M3 or M4, can't add ram, can't add high-end graphics cards for deep-learning and AI computation. I can understand those limitations in a mac studio small form factor but not a big tower like the mac pro. Apple will use poor sales performance as an excuse and discontinue it.