As someone who just invested in a Mac Pro late last year, I'm a bit frustrated. I wanted years for a modular design that I could keep and upgrade over a longer time only to find out I'll be forcefully phased out within 2 years.
I'd say if you purchased a Mac Pro, it's still the same. If you find yourself not having enough power, you bought the wrong machine to begin with (probably modern threadripper pro would be what you should have been looking for)
If the computer satisfies all your performance needs, what use is it to "feel frustruated" over something that was expected to come?
Don't feel Fear of Missing Out. The Mac Pro didn't change. Your feelings about it changed because of marketing and advertising (ie apple trying to persuade you that you need the M1, when in fact your computing needs are being taken care of already)
Wait for the next generation after that current M1/M1x mac pros and go for the next generations when apple comes out with 128 Cores and 256G of ram.
One constant of computer industry, there will always be the next chip, the next computer, and by then, the fancy M1 Mac Pro will become obsolete. Exactly like how nobody wants a 486 computer anymore but when it was released it was the hottest thing on the planet. Its day will come when everyone says "oh that M1? that was a slow POS that is now ewaste"
1) The details were all speculation. 2) There was no other option if you needed more horsepower. 3)_I'm happy with the current Mac Pro, but its going to be phased out of software support before its time, just like the Motorolla.
So it's more about the software support being phased out than new hardware coming out.
If you want the software support, wait until the support dies/runs out, and then buy the newest computer at that time, when you need it.
You'll find that apple will drop support for the M1 too in the future. Its day will come when Apple decides the neural engine is too outdated or the architecture is too old and will stop support it as well. That's a fact, not speculation.
This is precisely why I as a consumer do not buy Apple products. Apple has a long history of dropping product support with no upgradeable path forward, only buying new hardware.
This is also, in my speculation, the reason Apple is one of the most valuable companies on the planet, even though they are primarily a consumer products company. There's a constant internal urge for the newest shiniest product (which consumers of all products feel), but also the very real external requirement to buy new if you want to work with anything new.
My best anecdotal experience for this was when my uncle contacted me because his wife bought him an iPod Touch, but his Mac was telling him he needed a newer version of iTunes (I believe he bought the Mac 4 years prior). It turned out however that the new version of iTunes couldn't be installed on his "outdated" Mac because it was bundled with an OS update that his machine was too old to receive. I meanwhile was able to load iTunes under Windows on a machine twice the age of his Mac and connect the Touch without issue. He didn't want a new Mac, didn't need a new Mac, but chose to buy a new one to work with the rest of his ecosystem.
It's not speculation to know that whatever computer is bought this year will be bested by what comes next year.
Comments like this are always just so empty to me. This person was looking for a more powerful Mac, so suggesting they should have been looking for a CPU that's never going to be available for use in a Mac is just grandstanding. This person had been waiting for years for a product from Apple to replace the worthless trashcan systems. How your suggesting of something never to be available is helpful eludes me.
My suggestion was if there wasn't enough power, and the person needed a computer (which is the only reason one would buy a mac exactly during this changeover point), then a threadripper pro running linux would be the way to go for many workloads.
The alternative is to just wait a few months and see what comes.
Except for all of the software that doesn't run on Linux.
>The alternative is to just wait a few months and see what comes.
If one did this with Apple, one would never buy a product.
This is the reality really, if you actually wanted power then the Mac Pro just wasn't what you should have bought. Threadripper + Nvidia cards would take you way further for far less and with a clear sustainable upgrade path.
Also really after the past 10 years of Apple's pro moves with their last 2 "workstation" machines being discontinued it seems very risking investing so much money in their pro line.
Everyone then bought the current Mac Pro, but were disappointed that nothing else really fits into the slots aside from the things that Apple offered themselves (Nvidia cards won't work in the current Gen Intel Mac Pros.)
What makes anyone think the next Apple Silicon based Mac Pro will be any different?
Wanting a more modular mac pro is more like wishful thinking or wanting something to be different when reality is clearly saying something.
It's a little upsetting to see even the 12-core version get smoked by the M1 Mini, but it's from 2013 so what do I really expect.
Still nice and quiet and compiles iOS apps just fine.
So far the answer seems to be, there is no getting around these CPU issues through tailoring the compiler flags etc. and the best people can get is amelioration of the problem, not getting it back on par with normally inferior Intel chips. Again, the issue is that the Threadripper stuff is eating unreasonable CPU and the Intel stuff, normally not as good, is not doing that.
I suspect what you're looking at there is a CPU architecture that's getting optimized for specific conditions, which my plugins don't meet. There seems no fix other than 'you should be playing Mass Effect on this computer instead'.
I'm sure that it would destroy the Intel computer if you're doing that, but generalizing that to all conditions seems not justified.
Buy a mac, sell it after 1 year (many stores offer a buy back program for this exact purpose), get another new mac.
Easy. Done.
When the "new" Mac Pro was announced, the shift to ARM processors for MacOS was at most rumored and it also wasn't obvious that such a CPU would perform well.
If people knew this was "going to come", they would likely not have invested a significant amount of cash into a platform that was already on its way out.
> One constant of computer industry, there will always be the next chip, the next computer, and by then, the fancy M1 Mac Pro will become obsolete.
Unlike the incremental improvements you get with each new Intel CPU generation, this is quite a disruption. The PPC Macs soon were obsolete after the Intel Macs came about. All the efforts went into the new platform.
> Its day will come when everyone says "oh that M1? that was a slow POS that is now ewaste"
Things don't move that fast anymore. Take a 10-year-old Intel CPU, it's still quite capable. That certainly wasn't the case 10 years ago, or 20 years ago.
I kid, obviously. I've never seen anybody refer to the PowerPC as Motorola machines even though Motorola was part of the PowerPC alliance.
And third-parties will supply upgrades as the upgradable parts are roughly standard, so the Mac Pro is likely to be a completely usable machine for nearly a decade to come.
After that you’ll still get years on older MacOS, Linux, or Windows. Intel Macs can run both of the latter.
Feels like wanting to be both on the cutting edge of performance, and running/developing for a Mac, is damn pricey. However, I'd rather have it this way, than sit with my current machine being the best you could get. In some ways I am gratified that Apple is busy making last year's news feel really inadequate.
You can be damn sure I'm devoting a lot of effort to promptly supporting the new architecture. I've already got literally hundreds of M1 builds for my Audio Unit plugins out. I chose to produce native versions of EVERY product, no matter how old it was: rather than make a new product and only release that for M1, I treated it as the same as the 32/64 bit transition, and re-did every product in the whole library.
If we're going to get absurdly capable Mac computers, I mean to be categorically included in that equation.
For now, I'll enjoy my very costly iMac Pro that's still very capable… AND the M1 Macbook Pro at a fifth of the price that outperforms the iMac Pro at a few things already.
Jobs specifically hated that, and it was indeed the Mac II where Gassee and others pressured him into producing a Mac with more expandability.