Why does Apple hate Mac Studio and Mac Pro users?

[M4M]

I can't be the only one who feels like this - assuming we have to wait until June, why release the best versions of the M4 chips just 4 months before the M5 chips? It's completely possible for them to work towards a release schedule where all Macs are released in the same month (or quarter) but they do it because they know people may opt for the Studio over the MBP or a customised Mini - which is where they more than likely make the most profit.

To give you an example, and assuming Mac Studio prices don't change:

- M4 Mini with the 14/20 Pro chip, 64GB of RAM and 2TB SSD and a 10 Gigabit ethernet port: £2,899
- M2 Studio with 12/30 Max chip, 64GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD will cost £3,099

For an extra £200 you get the Max chip, better cooling, better connectivity, more options, etc.

Pretty sure the top end Macs would be celebrated first if Jobs was still around!

Anyone else feel like this? I can't be the only one!!!

 

[fathergll]

1. From what I understand there simply isn't enough production lines to support newer 3nm chip orders this year for A series and M series(iPhone, iPad, Macbooks, Mac Minis, iMacs) and for whatever high end Ultra chip they have planned for the Mac Studio.

2. Mac Studio is a niche product compared what the 3nm orders are going for this year like the iPhone, iPad, Macbooks which accounts for far more revenue so Apple would never sacrifice production of other products to make a minority of users happy.

 

[M4M]

1. From what I understand there simply isn't enough production lines to support newer 3nm chip orders this year for A series and M series(iPhone, iPad, Macbooks, Mac Minis, iMacs) and for whatever high end Ultra chip they have planned for the Mac Studio.

2. Mac Studio is a niche product compared what the 3nm orders are going for this year like the iPhone, iPad, Macbooks which accounts for far more revenue so Apple would never sacrifice production of other products to make a minority of users happy.

I don't buy that at all, pretty sure a company with $14.7B profit on $94.9B revenue over just the last quarter could overcome any production hurdles, particularly as you say it's for a smaller number of units.

I suspect it's more to do with impacting profit - they'd sell far fewer maxed out MBPs and Minis as it'd be more cost effective to buy a Studio.

 

[MacPoulet]

I can't be the only one who feels like this - assuming we have to wait until June, why release the best versions of the M4 chips just 4 months before the M5 chips? It's completely possible for them to work towards a release schedule where all Macs are released in the same month (or quarter) but they do it because they know people may opt for the Studio over the MBP or a customised Mini - which is where they more than likely make the most profit.

To give you an example, and assuming Mac Studio prices don't change:

- M4 Mini with the 14/20 Pro chip, 64GB of RAM and 2TB SSD and a 10 Gigabit ethernet port: £2,899
- M2 Studio with 12/30 Max chip, 64GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD will cost £3,099

For an extra £200 you get the Max chip, better cooling, better connectivity, more options, etc.

Pretty sure the top end Macs would be celebrated first if Jobs was still around!

Anyone else feel like this? I can't be the only one!!!

I don't remember them being celebrated "first" because it all had to do with chip availability and that was on Intel, and earlier Motorola.

If I remember correctly, Xeons are usually based on the previous gen consumer chip technology, so in a way, they're not as "new" but they have (had) other features like ECC memory that made them a better choice for workstation and server use. Reliability often trumps the latest and greatest when you're in that segment.

Wouldn't be surprised if we see the Studio/Mac Pro updated on a 2 or even 3 year cycle to be more inline with corporate lifecycle purchases.

 

[fathergll]

I don't buy that at all, pretty sure a company with $14.7B profit on $94.9B revenue over just the last quarter could overcome any production hurdles, particularly as you say it's for a smaller number of units.

I suspect it's more to do with impacting profit - they'd sell far fewer maxed out MBPs and Minis as it'd be more cost effective to buy a Studio.

I don't know what to tell you. It's been reported multiple times Apple already has been placing their orders at full capacity of what they can produce. Fiat doesn't make things magically appear. They have to ramp up production lines which is what has been going over in the past year. Priority is for A series and M series that are for iPad/Macbooks,iMacs/Mac Minis).

SOC for Ultra ain't a priority for the company and you won't see it for a long time just like we are sitting here in late 2023 without a Mac Studio for over a year while there has been 2 cycles of Macpros released since it. Mac Studio and Mac desktops are not a priority for Apple plain and simple. It hasn't been for a very long time. Apple has a long history of not updating various desktops/workstations for long perioids over the years like the Mini, iMac, Mac Pro. Mac Studio is now starting to see this. We have yet to see them ever do this to the Macbook Pros for good reason and especially iPhone which is where they make most of their money.

 

[M4M]

...which is where they make most of their money.

You hit the nail on head there - that's all it boils down to, sadly.

 

[Pezimak]

I think it’s timing. If you look at it next year the only products Apple has to update really is the usual iPhone, Apple Watch Ultra 2 if it chooses to, and the baseline iPad and that’s it. So IMO they have planned and deliberately delayed the launch of the updated Studio and Pro so they had something else to launch next year. Maybe they’ll update the
pro monitor too?

Devices updated this year is every other Mac bar the Pro and Studio, Apple Pencil and iPads bar the base line model, iPhones, Apple Watch, headphones. Keyboard and Mouse, trackpad.

I also suspect the Studio will see a price increase.

 

[Velin]

I don't buy that at all, pretty sure a company with $14.7B profit on $94.9B revenue over just the last quarter could overcome any production hurdles, particularly as you say it's for a smaller number of units.

I suspect it's more to do with impacting profit - they'd sell far fewer maxed out MBPs and Minis as it'd be more cost effective to buy a Studio.

You may want to revise this statement. Apple doesn't "produce" any silicon. That's TSMC. And Apple will take only what TSMC will give them. Apple isn't overcoming anything when it comes to foundry.

 

[Bearxor]

Yeah this is definitely a yield issue. Especially for the Ultra chip.

Give them six months to sell through the normal MBP models and they can start diverting some of that capacity to ultra chips.

My guess is also that M4 ultra won’t be just two M4 Max’s glued together either.

 

[fathergll]

You hit the nail on head there - that's all it boils down to, sadly.

It's been trending this way for many years starting under Steve Jobs when they renamed from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple Inc in 2007.

At the end of the day Apple sells stock and their current 3+ trillion dollar market cap is mostly because of everything besides their Mac desktops(Look into their 10-Ks which tell investors where they make money and very little comes from Mac desktops as a percentage). If they were a private company like Valve they could do as they please but Tim Cook and the rest of the board of directors job is to keep that stock price up so anytime they make decisions it's based on that which is why you see them now releasing lots of unfinished products like Apple AI at WWDC because they need headlines. When TSMC is at max capacity and can't deliver any more yields of chips Apple is going to deliver those chips to the products that make the most revenue.

 

[MacPoulet]

Variations of this conversation have been going on in the Mac Pro forum for years.

And it's a total no-win scenario, no matter what choice Apple makes, it'll be the wrong one for a certain group of users. Not trying to defend Apple, just acknowledging that there's a broad range of users with different needs and sometimes those needs can conflict.

 

[M4M]

And it's a total no-win scenario, no matter what choice Apple makes, it'll be the wrong one for a certain group of users.

How will releasing all Macs with the same family of the chip around the same time (i.e giving people real choice) be wrong for some people? Seems very unlikely that it would, and if it were, probably a much smaller quantity.

 

[MacPoulet]

How will releasing all Macs with the same family of the chip around the same time (i.e giving people real choice) be wrong for some people? Seems very unlikely that it would, and if it were, probably a much smaller quantity.

According to some Mac Pro users, just being on Apple Silicon is the wrong choice, so no matter what generation is released and when, it's automatically the wrong choice cause it's not a Xeon with an Nvidia card.

Like I said, no-win scenario.

 

[Regulus67]

What a way to join macrumors.

I can't be the only one who feels like this - assuming we have to wait until June, why release the best versions of the M4 chips just 4 months before the M5 chips? ......
....
Pretty sure the top end Macs would be celebrated first if Jobs was still around!

A reasonable answer from fathergll is instantly met with

I don't buy that at all, ....

To top it off...

You hit the nail on head there - that's all it boils down to, sadly.

So it was a rhetorical question. Only fishing for answers you have already decided are the correct

👏

 

[M4M]

A reasonable answer from fathergll is instantly met with...

So I'm not allowed to disagree now!?

I stand by what I said - I'm pretty sure a company with $14.7B profit on $94.9B revenue over just the last quarter could overcome production hurdles if they wanted to. If you think Apple, as one of the biggest companies in the world, can't, fine, you're welcome to your opinion--but I don't have to agree with you.

 

[M4M]

According to some Mac Pro users, just being on Apple Silicon is the wrong choice, so no matter what generation is released and when, it's automatically the wrong choice cause it's not a Xeon with an Nvidia card.

Can you link to some blog posts or videos with the reasoning for this? I'd guess it's a very small minority?

 

[Kurwenal]

If Apple hated Mac Studio and Mac Pro users, there would be no Mac Studio and Mac Pro users.

 

[MacPoulet]

Can you link to some blog posts or videos with the reasoning for this? I'd guess it's a very small minority?

Here are a few, happy reading:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/so-who-ordered-a-new-mac-pro.2392112/

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/system-76-made-the-arm-mac-pro-we-actually-want.2440757/

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-pro-x-y-what-if.2391629/

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/buy-cheap-7-1-or-studio.2421880/

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-pro-8-1-what-if.2368905/

I'll just say that while I find the Apple Silicon Macs fantastic and a Mac Studio happens to address my needs very well (just waiting on the M4 Max because I want certain features and have the luxury of doing so), there are some long-time users who aren't happy with this direction, or have specific needs that are no longer met in the Mac ecosystem and have had to switch.

I'm hopeful that eventually the Mac Pro will be more than a $3000 upcharge for additional PCIE slots and be a real barnburner for those users who need it.

 

[Steviant]

I'm not sure how people haven't noticed that Apple have been ******** on pro users more-or-less since the iPhone proved to be such a runaway success. Apple's design team are always a few years ahead of production, so from about 2010 onwards pro support has been in a downward spiral.

All the people who kept Apple alive during it's darkest years are now being pushed aside in favor of mainstream users. Apple has been repeatedly slapping the faces of the education market, pro Unix users, print designers, graphic designers, web designers, programmers, musicians and video editors with each new release of their software it becomes less useful for anything except the most mainstream of users.

It's easy to see why; most Mac users are very slow on the uptake, seemingly suffering from the same form of Stockholm Syndrome that Microsoft customers suffer from, so Apple knows they can stomp on your toes and snatch the money out of your hand while you scream in pain, and you'll line up for the same treatment next year.

The time is long overdue and the market is ripe for someone to come along with a computing experience that values and respects the user, just as the phone market was ripe for the same thing when the iPhone first appeared. Apple is no longer a company that can deliver something like that and neither are Microsoft or Google, who have become addicted to the corporate opioid that is advertising money.

Pro users take more effort (money) per user to support than muppets who just want to open 27,000 tabs in a web browser, and there are zillions of those idiots who wouldn't know a decent computing experience if it was right in front of them. Tim Cook is good at keeping the wheels of the money making machine greased with the blood sweat and tears of chinese kids, but not so good at innovation or exploiting opportunities, it seems.

Hopefully someone (obviously not any of the current "distributors") can take the super efficient Linux kernel with its broad hardware support and build a sensibly designed user experience on top, that's what the world really needs right now.

 

[Mike57000]

Professional users are a problem for Apple. They need support, quick and easy repair, software stability and compatibility. Apple has never been able to provide on-site support or backward compatibility for more than 5 years. From a financial point of view, the MacPro 3.1 ->5.1 were upgradable and reliable, with insufficient margin. And 40% margin is top priority. The return on investment for subsequent MacPro models was insufficient or unprofitable. This is the case every time one of their products, however obsolete, remains on sale for years without any updates.
So yes, they've apologised for their mistake in designing the bin Macpro, but at the same time it's taken them years to design a new one... that's overpriced. And now it is rarely updated.

 

[flybass]

I'm not sure how people haven't noticed that Apple have been ******** on pro users more-or-less since the iPhone proved to be such a runaway success. Apple's design team are always a few years ahead of production, so from about 2010 onwards pro support has been in a downward spiral.

All the people who kept Apple alive during it's darkest years are now being pushed aside in favor of mainstream users. Apple has been repeatedly slapping the faces of the education market, pro Unix users, print designers, graphic designers, web designers, programmers, musicians and video editors with each new release of their software it becomes less useful for anything except the most mainstream of users.

It's easy to see why; most Mac users are very slow on the uptake, seemingly suffering from the same form of Stockholm Syndrome that Microsoft customers suffer from, so Apple knows they can stomp on your toes and snatch the money out of your hand while you scream in pain, and you'll line up for the same treatment next year.

The time is long overdue and the market is ripe for someone to come along with a computing experience that values and respects the user, just as the phone market was ripe for the same thing when the iPhone first appeared. Apple is no longer a company that can deliver something like that and neither are Microsoft or Google, who have become addicted to the corporate opioid that is advertising money.

Pro users take more effort (money) per user to support than muppets who just want to open 27,000 tabs in a web browser, and there are zillions of those idiots who wouldn't know a decent computing experience if it was right in front of them. Tim Cook is good at keeping the wheels of the money making machine greased with the blood sweat and tears of chinese kids, but not so good at innovation or exploiting opportunities, it seems.

Hopefully someone (obviously not any of the current "distributors") can take the super efficient Linux kernel with its broad hardware support and build a sensibly designed user experience on top, that's what the world really needs right now.

Preach my friend! A little dark, but a lot of truth here.

 

[mctrials23]

God you lot are doom and gloom. Apple have the best machines in the world for professionals but you are complaining that they neglect them? Come on.

 

[Cranky Cohen]

Business perspective - Ultra is niche, and does not sell that much. Manufacturing perspective - the yield on the Ultra will be way lower. It's not "just" 2 Max chips bolted together, you need bigger masks, and any error that would kill 1 chip out of 2, now essentially kills the whole thing. These big dies are really really hard to nail, and are in casino territory, as you simply can't beat physics. Them running smaller dies 1st to fine tune the process would not be unheard of.

Also, people usually don't realize how long lead times on modern CPUs are. For something like the Ultra or latest Intel, we are in the ballpark of 60-80 *days*. Add 3-4 months for line setup minimum (you can probably shave 20-25% of lead time when in this stage as there is no bottleneck on the line, but you need multiple full runs to validate the process still). It's not like you decide to print chips one day, and get them in mail on 2nd. The Ultra design may not even be finalized when the annoucement dropped, and it's also highly possible, they work on multiple generations in parallel in different teams, so basic M5 may be more finalized then top of the line model of previous gen - you really need a lot of data from runs, to feed back to the design.

 

[CWallace]

I stand by what I said - I'm pretty sure a company with $14.7B profit on $94.9B revenue over just the last quarter could overcome production hurdles if they wanted to. If you think Apple, as one of the biggest companies in the world, can't, fine, you're welcome to your opinion--but I don't have to agree with you.

A modern fab costs billions and takes years to build and bring online. That TSMC is advancing process nodes (5nm, 3nm, 2nm, etc.) and adding production capacity as fast as they are is because Apple buys so many SoCs from them that TSMC is willing to invest that money and time.


As to why Apple doesn't prioritize the Ultra SOC for each generation is because per channel monitoring firms, the Mac Pro makes up about 3% of Mac sales and the Mac Studio makes up 1% (and the Ultra less than that). When Apple announces a new generation of Max SoC, they will sell every one TSMC can fab for many months in a MacBook Pro model (as the MBP family makes up over half of all Mac sales) so even though they probably need a small percentage to meet Ultra demand, they are not going to divert that production until TSMC's yields are strong enough to meet all MBP Max demand plus Ultra SoC demand and that takes a number of months.