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Comment by unfocussed_mike | Hacker News Reader

I guess. I mean, it's a forgettable stopgap machine (I forgot it ;-) It's not really what people wanted, is it? It's just something they had to put on sale to shut people up. A conventional, Intel-era thing.

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.

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What? It's a whole new tower with PCIe slots and everything, and was super well received. Were you still under the impression they were selling the trashcan Mac Pro?

I simply forgot that they made it. I forgot a lot of stuff in 2020 and 2021, like most people.

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?

If all you want is disks then the Mac Studio seems to be exactly what you'd want. I would assume people that want a tower want exactly what you were asking for above, which is GPUs or other cards like audio engineers need.

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.

"I forgot about it so it must not be great".

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 forgot about it so it must not be great".

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.

They've been very pragmatic ever since Jony Ive left.

Here is the target market

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I

This is Apple's core creative audience.

If their GPU can do workloads replaceable ones can’t then it’s worth it. If you need that amount of GPU, you’re doing high end shit with a high end budget, and can afford to just replace the machine in 2 years (if you even need it - many people stick with their Mac Pro 5-10 years).

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.

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