And since the presenter mentioned the Mac Pro would come on another day, I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that.
What can they really do, in a single machine, that is more "Pro" than the Studio? How are they going to bring developers along when most aren't developing for twenty-core machines?
I still think something else is coming. Maybe something unconventionally stackable. Something for render farms.
Whatever it is, it feels like it's going to need novel OS support.
What's left? Render farms, scaleable computing.
I guess I think there will be some sort of new machine in that segment. But I figure it's not going to be what people expect from a single, unitary Mac Pro desktop.
Because once you're up at that level of performance requirement, you start to want modular and scaleable things.
What is the pitch for the part of the market that is used to using commodity hardware in scaleable configurations?
[0] Edit: I obviously forgot the cheese grater
Looking at the Mac Studio... what would an M1-based, drop-in Mac Pro replacement offer on top? That sounds like a tail-end product.
It's not like 2022 Apple is the kind of business that announces deep partnerships with graphics card makers.
It feels more to me like we're going to see either something that is half-rack-half-Mac, or something with major developments in neural engine hardware, or something.
A new segment -- something that is going to need significant new OS work.
Not at all.
What I said if you read the rest of my comments is that I find it difficult to believe there is a specifically single-desktop-machine use case for that kind of power over and above the Mac Studio.
The reason I mention this is that high end (TV and cinema) CGI just is not the domain of single machines anymore; it's the domain of render farms. The people who do that kind of work for TV and cinema now expect to run farms of commodity hardware that can be swapped out and replaced. And that technology is available to everyone in a way that can be constructed more pragmatically.
Scientific workloads, similarly: most of that market is not going to spend a bucketload on a single Mac when they can spread their risk with cluster computing.
App testing: again, an application for clustering, and low cost hardware spreads risk.
So my point, again: given the existence of the iMac Pro line, and the M1 Ultra Mac Studio (with its evident astonishing GPU performance), given that I imagine most Mac Pro users never put an expansion card in their machines (which is the grand theme of Apple -- people don't upgrade or expand, usually), and given that cluster hardware is commonly in use and well-supported, is the niche for single mega-expensive desktops really big enough?
I don't think it is -- you think it is. But I think you can disagree with me without imagining me stupid, as I disagree with you without doing the same.
The visual arts this thing is going to enable us going to be amazing, and we haven’t even seen the Pro yet. One former client has been texting me all day about ideas from 10 years ago that weren’t feasible but now are with this lil thing. I keep telling him to wait for the Pro then we can take some REALLY neat ideas off the shelf.
Aside from the fact that you're making my point for me -- you think the Mac Studio could do the job you imagine a Mac Pro doing -- there is this:
You tell your former customers to wait for an unreleased, as yet unscheduled update to a product to which historically Apple has displayed considerable, time-insensitive indifference, rather than order maybe multiples of the product that has been announced, or try to make it work somehow with kit that exists?
I'll note down your prediction about $8000. That, I guess, would be interesting. But if it's that cheap it's going to be after the chip shortage is over, surely.
The latest generation is from 2019?
They've been saying "something really great is coming", all that. That Mac Pro was not that.
Does Apple still care about the market that wants to plug in internal GPU cards? Does that make much sense even in the context of hardware the speed of the Mac Studio?
I wonder.
But by extension I certainly don't remember it being "super well received", or I'd probably have remembered it at all.
Either way: look at it. It's a tower PC. Do you think the current Apple trajectory has any meaningful room for that? What are people going to really be putting in it except disks?
I didn't see a single negative review of the tower at all, so I'm really not sure where that comes from. And they said during the keynote today a new one is coming.
It's an amazing machine. It's an incredibly expensive machine, but still amazing.
> Do you think the current Apple trajectory has any meaningful room for that?
Are you upset that you think Apple is going to stop making something that you forgot they made, except there is absolutely 0 evidence that they will stop making it? We know for a fact that they are going to release a new Apple Silicon based Mac Pro. We knew Mac Pro would be the last thing they move over to Apple Silicon. Apple even gave a timeline when they first launched M1, and so far it seems to be on track.
Apple has been extremely pragmatic lately, backtracking on objectively bad decisions around everything from keyboards and ports to form factors.
I didn't phrase it that way, but thanks, I guess. Whatever.
> Are you upset that you think Apple is going to stop making something that you forgot they made, except there is absolutely 0 evidence that they will stop making it?
I didn't say they'd stop making it, quite.
So much as that I think the product designation is a phantom, in a way. And the more alternatives they add to the Mac Pro, the less the market needs it.
How many people who bought the forgettable machine put an expansion card in it, do you think? How many of those people thus simply do not need anything more than the Studio?
And also: how many third party manufacturers are going to rush out of the gate to port their drivers to some complex new multiprocessing M1 machine?
I agree they have been pragmatic. But I think they've also sliced and diced this segment to the point where it doesn't make the sense it did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I
This is Apple's core creative audience.
Tons of people in pro industries bought it and love it. Pre-COVID it was sold out for almost a year. Every professional music producer I know bought one, and I’m sure they’ll get the M1 Mac Pro.
Funny story. Max Martin partnered with Creative to make a new audio rack to enable the audio for the first Back Street Boys album. That got miniaturized to audio cards for gaming which further shrunk down to a DAC and that lead to the iPod which lead to the iPhone which lead to Apple Silicon which brought us here today. Music producers are huge fucking tech nerds and literally move technology forward. Apple frequently works with producers when developing their highest end products that eventually trickle down to consumer grade.
I'm guessing the Mac Pro will focus more on Upgradability and adding expansion slots? That seems like a direction Apple is willing to go tbh.
Seems interesting!
Drive bays, yeah. Maybe some approach towards coprocessor boards.
But none of this new direction shrieks out "install your own graphics card" anymore.
A friend told me last night that he thinks there's really a lot of generic resistance to the idea of using thunderbolt in this way, and that is what makes the Mac Pro necessary.
Reading more replies I think it's also clear that people still question Apple's GPU claims, and maybe there is more of a market for whatever-PCI-bus GPU cards.
Moreover I think if you look at the Mac Studio, it is difficult to imagine Apple thinking that a straightforward M1/M2 cheese grater is a remotely satisfactory product design.
But I've been told enough times that I am wrong, (albeit by people who were blown away by a keynote -- am I just old?) that I'm cheerfully willing to admit that I probably will be.
And I bet the Studio is a way to release what they've done so far to serve a subset of the Pro market that has simpler expansion needs. The Pro likely requires a ton more work.
They showed it being used for pro audio, but that's a niche that still uses expansion cards a lot. Keeping the current mac pro form factor enables a lot of niche use cases.
One question is whether the M1 chips have enough connectivity to efficiently handle as many expansion cards as the current pro. Even the Max version of the CPU is limited to 4 thunderbolt ports.
I suspect Apple is set to debut powerful revision to the Mac Pro focused on AI/ML at WWDC.
I wrote about this 10 months back[0], and it still applies following Studio:
> It may not be obvious, but Apple has repair work to do in the pro community. Four years ago this month, Apple unusually disclosed that it was "completely rethinking the Mac Pro." [1]
> The current Mac Pro design wasn't announced until June of 2019 and didn't hit the market until December 10th of 2019. That's just six months prior to the Apple Silicon announcement.
> It seems unlikely Apple spent 2017-2019 designing a Mac Pro that they would not carry forward with Apple Silicon hardware.
> The current, Gen 3 2019 Mac Pro design has the Mac Pro Expansion Module (MPX). This is intended to be a plug-and-play system for graphics and storage upgrades. [2]
> While the Apple Silicon SoC can run with some GPU tasks, it does seem it does not make sense for the type of work that big discrete cards have generally been deployed for.
> There is already a living example of a custom Apple-designed external graphics card. Apple designed and released Afterburner, a custom "accelerator" card targeted at video editing with the gen 3 Mac Pro in 2019.
> Afterburner has attributes of the new Apple Silicon design in that it is proprietary to Apple and fanless. [3]
> It seems implausible Apple created the Afterburner product for a single release without plans to continue to upgrade and extend the product concept using Apple Silicon.
Given "Ultrafusion" it seems plausible that M2 would be able connect multiple custom SoCs that are littered with GPU cores as stackable accelerator cards.
> So, I think the question isn't if discrete Apple Silicon GPUs will be supported but how many types and in and what configurations.
This prediction not come to pass:
> I think the Mac Mini will remain its shape and size, and that alongside internal discrete GPUs for the Pro, Apple may release something akin to the Blackmagic eGPU products they collaborated on for the RX580 and Vega 56.
But at least the mid market display now exists. > While possibly not big sellers, Apple Silicon eGPUs would serve generations of new AS notebooks and minis. This creates a whole additional use case. The biggest problem I see with this being a cohesive ecosystem is the lack of a mid-market Apple display. [4]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956886
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives
[2] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-unveils-powerfu...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ywFqY5o1E
[4] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/wishful-thinking-wwdc-d...
I am really not sure about this bit, as you can probably deduce from what I've said elsewhere.
The rest is interesting but I think it's entirely possible they designed a tail-end tower PC to sell for three years.
---
You don't understand what Afterburner is, and as a result have read far too much significance into it, and haven't noticed that they've already moved on even before the new Mac Pro is out.
Afterburner isn't a "graphics card". It's just a FPGA on a PCIe x16 expansion card. Although in principle you could download an arbitrary bitstream to the FPGA and use it for a really wide variety of purposes, in practice Apple uses it for exactly one function: accelerating ProRes. That's Apple's proprietary low-loss video codec designed for use in video editing software, most notably their own Final Cut package.
They needed Afterburner in the Intel Mac Pro because they didn't want to burn CPU cores on a software ProRes codec, and none of the silicon available in the Intel/AMD/Nvidia ecosystem offers a hardware ProRes codec.
They don't need Afterburner in Apple Silicon Macs because they simply integrated a ProRes codec into M1 Pro/Max/Ultra. I wouldn't be surprised if they were able to share a lot of source code between the two implementations. The M1 version is lots faster than the Afterburner version, which isn't surprising when you know about the penalties FPGAs pay for being reprogrammable in the field.
I suspect the M1 Pro/Max/Ultra project came first, and the Afterburner port was a quick side project. To me, it's not implausible that it's a dead end, instead that's just about all it can be.
And obviously they are not lying about the Mac Pro, marketing is spin, not saying the opposite of the truth.
Also I wonder about fabrication nodes. The iPhone SE is going to take a lot of dies and keep that fan very busy. M1 is on something else, but it isn’t going to free the A15 fab for other customers.
I expect M2 is on a different process.
The wonders of auto-correct, I guess. It took me a moment to correct that to “and keep that faB very busy”.
”faN” made me wonder why you thought that phone ran hot and had a fan.
4 big cores, 4 little cores (like the M1, but based on newer gen iPhone cores) and 10 GPU cores instead of 8. Said to be based on TSMC 4nm.
We have the M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max and M1 Ultra so far.
Just go full anime.
At least it’s less confusing than the fucked up Intel and AMD product numbers.
I am curious to see how that device will look like. Surprisingly, with the last Mac Pro the modularity of the device and the ability to user-upgrade GPU, RAM or storage was actually a huge selling point that Apple emphasized. I can't imagine how this would work with Apple Silicon.
M1 Ludicrous (early 2023)
M1 Insane (late 2023)
Probably they'll make enough changes to release M2 by that time.
Will Epic add that naming to its case?
On scaling down, they simply designed and laid out M1 Max such that half the GPU cores, memory controllers, and media encoders were divisible from the rest of the chip, with the interface between the two a clean, straight cut line. To make M1 Pro masks, they likely just took the M1 Max mask artwork, cropped it, and did minor cleanup on the cropped edge to terminate all the dangling connections.
To make M1 Ultra, they just "glue" two M1 Max die together with advanced packaging and interconnect technology. Every M1 Max ships with an unused die-to-die interconnect block along one edge of the chip.
Cat namings were good and memorable but now I don't even remember what I'm using nor which version is newer. Even the spellings are hard for foreigners.