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> M1 mac pros were always going to come.

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.

> 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

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.

Those trash can pros are still great machines. They didn’t discontinue MacOS — that’s what matters.

Yup exactly everyone bought the trashcan mac (I have one now myself - I love these buggers!) and then were disappointed with the lack of expansion/improvement.

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.

I'm still using a trashcan Mac Pro on my desk, and it works just fine and is still receiving updates. macOS Big Sur 11.3.1.

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.

I'm currently grappling with an issue in my Linux VST development, where specifically Threadripper users are having issues. This is on Github and there are better people than me tackling it: it's an open source project so people can try everything they want.

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.

Resale value of macs is no joke. Always an option.

This is the best answer for the poster's situation.

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.

>(probably modern threadripper pro would be what you should have been looking for)

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.

Of course, as soon as the M1's were announced with the 2 year transition plan, the actual suggestion would have been to wait until the M1 mac pro comes out.

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.

> then a threadripper pro running linux

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.

Ryzentosh :)

"what use is it to "feel frustruated" over something that was expected to come"

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.

1) it is not speculation that there will be an M1 Mac Pro. Apple clearly says within the next 2 years there will be no more Intel macs for sale.

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.

> ...but its going to be phased out of software support before its time, just like the Motorolla.

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.

Apple typically has the last newer hardware support of any phone or pc manufacturer. My daughter still uses a 2011 iMac without problems and with relatively recent security updates.

> The details were all speculation.

It's not speculation to know that whatever computer is bought this year will be bested by what comes next year.