Apple reportedly prepping a pair of high-end Mac desktops ahead of WWDC
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macosandlinux
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Perfect time this WWDC for Apple to give current/future (if not EOL) Mac Pro owners some answers of the future of the Mac Pro line.
They could have named the 'Studio' the 'new Mac Pro' at the time, but it seems a tower was always planned, now maybe axed?
They could have named the 'Studio' the 'new Mac Pro' at the time, but it seems a tower was always planned, now maybe axed?
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So, what would a Mac Pro be that a Studio isn't? M2 Ultra in a tower chassis with internal expansion (slots, maybe socketed memory)? Two M2 Ultras glued together, i.e. a 4-way interconnect instead of the 2-way of the Ultra?
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I would imagine PCIe slots, and external (From the SOC) RAM. I could imagine them creating a seperate Mac Pro specific SOC for the latter, with extra oomph also, just to distance them from Intels chips.
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I just can’t see a Mac Pro tower making much sense when their Mx SoC/SiP architecture—with CPU and GPU on the chip and memory in the same package—removes much of the opportunity for upgradability. I’m hard-pressed to think what else they would do besides just putting more Mx SoCs in a box that would differentiate a Mac Pro from the Studio.
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Well that's interesting. My needs are right on the cusp of a M2 Mini with maxed out RAM or a current entry level Studio. The latter is more than I can justify spending most days but man, all those ports (and some other niceties). Some sweet clearance prices on the Studio would get me behind the wheel pretty quickly.
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I hope they fixed the whistling. I know not everyone got a Studio that did it (or noticed), but the noise on my Max was so apparent I ended up returning it. Some people had luck blocking a few of the rear vent holes, which was apparently enough to change the harmonics. Would be nice to see a less-hacky, more permanent fix.
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This.
I don't see Apple returning to socketed RAM. An expandable GPU seems incredibly unlikely too (eGPUs don't even work with M series processors). Expandable storage is likely going to be via thunderbolt ports.
I think their future paradigm is quite clear.
My real questions are--will we ever get MacOS on an iPad (airs and Pros run the same SOC as Macbooks) and touchscreens on a MacBook? The separation of those product lines is completely artificial for marketing reasons.
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What was it whistling? The soundtrack for all of those Justin Long / John Hodgman commercials?
Crossing my fingers that we finally get a super-powered Studio and the final nail in the coffin of the Pro. I have to think that the dithering on the fate of the Pro has left a lot of power users (me included) hanging onto their credit cards, hoping that a worthy upgrade is just around the corner.
Apple needs to pull the Band-Aid and put us holdouts out of our waiting room purgatory.
Crossing my fingers that we finally get a super-powered Studio and the final nail in the coffin of the Pro. I have to think that the dithering on the fate of the Pro has left a lot of power users (me included) hanging onto their credit cards, hoping that a worthy upgrade is just around the corner.
Apple needs to pull the Band-Aid and put us holdouts out of our waiting room purgatory.
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Maybe and yes. The separation is not artificial. There are real, non-trivial problems to be solved with putting a touch interface on MacOS. Hardly impossible to solve, but require real work to address. And this is what's holding back both both items. You won't see this in a hardware announcement but a lot of WWDC sessions targeting developers followed some months later with hardware.
But Apple is much more motivated to put iPadOS on Mac hardware than MacOS on iPadOS hardware. The truth is, there are WAY more people using a Mac that should be running iPadOS than there are the reverse - understanding that the only fundamental difference between the two is that iPadOS/iOS transfer security responsibility to Apple and are vastly more secure devices as a result. Most users not only don't need to be responsible for their own security, they're so bad at it that they should be encouraged to buy a device that simply doesn't ask that of them. The only people that really need MacOS are those that write code and therefore need to breach that security model. That is a pretty small subset of Mac users, and accommodating them on iPad hardware doesn't seem terribly important.
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I did some similar comparisons earlier this year. And the biggest difference that would push me to a Studio is that it has double the memory bandwidth of the Mini.
I'm going to retire my 2014 i7 mini this yeah, but can't do so until I solve running a custom VM that I use all the time on my Mini. I'm in the process of doing that, so I can wait and hope new and better systems drop in the process.
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I think this is Apple's conundrum. The market for a Mac Pro wants upgradeability (RAM, GPU, etc.) Yet they're committed to SoC architecture. And the Mac Pro (or its predecessors like Quadra) have long been a marque product for them. I can imagine their design team trying to split that baby.
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No, I think a lot of users who are not coders would not want to work with iPadOs as their primary system.
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set yourself with refurb-tracker and watch the studios fly by: at least in Canada, the online apple refurb store has had some serious fire sale (by apple standards) pricing on mac studios...
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What would you use the PCIe slots for?
I'm not saying there aren't any useful cards, just that none of them work with macOS (or any other OS on Apple Silicon - as in Asahi Linux) and that I doubt anyone is interested anymore in making expansion cards for a very uncertain Apple product line. The volume would be too small.
Anyone making exotic expansion cards today will just write drivers for Windows and Linux for x64 and maybe arm64 and call it a day.
With regards to expansion cards, it is the same unenviable niche position Talos Computer with their Power based workstations is in.
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You realize that there's almost nothing preventing Apple from continuing to add MacOS-like features to iPad OS. They added mouse support.
I'm not arguing that in its current state it's a drop-in replacement. I'm arguing that the only thing that iPadOS can't enable is arbitrary code execution. But they can improve file handling, and all of the other complaints. But you can't run python outside of a sandbox. I'd also argue that it's easier to bring iPadOS to meet the needs of most MacOS users than it to get a touch interface working on MacOS, given that the former is done entirely inside Apple, and the latter needs a LOT of buy-in from developers.
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Yeah. They're smart, so they could probably come up with a non-uniform memory architecture that had both on-chip RAM and external slots. But it would be a lot of work, and a lot of complexity, for a fairly niche product.
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Essentially that. More SoCs.
Mac Pro becomes an expandable tower of compute blades, where each blade is an M-Ultra.
Most of the workloads that are more than a single M-Ultra can handle, will be server farm capable type work and dividing it between blades shouldn't be too problematic.
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Apple could treat the on-chip RAM as a giant cache for the two or four terabytes of socketed RAM. I'm sure this would require changes to the chip so the question is whether the cost of the new chip variation is worth the anticipated revenue--that is, does it make business sense?
Similar considerations apply to using several Ultra chips in the Mac Pro. They would need to solve things like cache coherency between the chips, something that they already do within the chips. It's technically expensive, but it's certainly possible. But, does it make business sense?
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For such a product it's GPU/AI accelerators. That's literally the whole market. It's a market Apple needs to be in, but it's also a very difficult one to stay in front of with a bundled strategy and a relatively small user base.
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Serious question: do journalists like to write these pre-WWDC articles where they speculate on things that are going to be announced in just a few days? Or do they write them because that’s what people want?
In other words, which one of these best describes Andrew’s thoughts:
“People please stop clicking on these articles so that I can write something that will still matter a week from now.”
Or
“Sweet, another WWDC. I’m going to spend a week writing about what might happen, and then several days writing about what is happening, and then cap it with an article summarizing what did happen. By the time it’s finished I’ll essentially have written an entire magazine issue on just one thing.”
Edit: I’m not blaming Andrew for writing this article. It’s clearly what many people want to read. I’m just wondering if he’s happy with that situation or if he wishes he didn’t have to.
In other words, which one of these best describes Andrew’s thoughts:
“People please stop clicking on these articles so that I can write something that will still matter a week from now.”
Or
“Sweet, another WWDC. I’m going to spend a week writing about what might happen, and then several days writing about what is happening, and then cap it with an article summarizing what did happen. By the time it’s finished I’ll essentially have written an entire magazine issue on just one thing.”
Edit: I’m not blaming Andrew for writing this article. It’s clearly what many people want to read. I’m just wondering if he’s happy with that situation or if he wishes he didn’t have to.
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I got a Studio Max shortly after it was announced— replacing a nearly 10 year old iMac. The Studio is more computer than I need for the foreseeable future, the incremental improvements in an M2 Studio don’t tempt me. As the MacOS-computer-on-my-desk, I’m happy with it, but there’s no denying that the Studio is overkill. I suspect that my situation is pretty common, and raises some question about just who an improved Studio would be aimed at.
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It really wouldn't be a lot of work, or complex.
Adding a DDR interface to a chip is trivial. (Everybody else manages to do it just fine.)
And MacOS already has a non-uniform memory architecture: compressed memory.
All Apple would have to do is add an extra step before compressing memory, i.e., move the memory/data to sticks of DDR (if they're installed). Done. It would actually be pretty trivial to do.
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It seems like there might be a lot of intersection between 1) niche software that requires high performance, and 2) software that runs poorly, or not at all, via Rosetta (because it's niche and weird, or maybe not well supported).
So maybe there are a bunch of Mac Pro users who are dependent on the Pro being x86? And that's why Apple has been so slow to release an ARM Pro.
So maybe there are a bunch of Mac Pro users who are dependent on the Pro being x86? And that's why Apple has been so slow to release an ARM Pro.
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Well that's sort of what the trash can Pro was. It was not really a Pro, it was a "higher end" machine. I think had they called it the Mac or even Mac Studio no one would have complained.
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It has to have expansion slots for the myriad pro hardware out there to plug into. It really needs a way to add more powerful graphics cards (yes, they still blow away what is built in for high end users), and they need to have a way to add tons of ram. That is no easy task with their current architecture.
My guess is adding memory in addition to what is on die that works like the different layers of cache. I have no idea on how to add the graphics cards when they are used to having pooled memory. Perhaps just highly custom drivers that use system memory instead of on die? I cannot come up with a solution that does not sound ridiculous. Probably why it is way past their self-given timeline and still hasn't shipped. They probably had to go back and add features to the chips to handle the extensions.
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Current Mac Pros come with up to 1500 GB of ram. For a price. I wonder how many they sell with more than 192GB which is what the m2 ultra limit should be. And how far a 4GB/sec SSD with virtual memory would get you.
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The OS still functions with discrete graphics cards. The current version of MacOS runs on the x86 Mac Pro, which has a discrete graphics card. So they really wouldn't have to add or change anything for an ARM-based Mac Pro to support discrete graphics cards.
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They could add one channel for external memory and that would only require about 100 pins on the SoC.
With one channel, and buffered memory (which is common for servers and workstations), that would give you up to four slots for RAM. Maybe six, but definitely four.
You can buy four 128 GB sticks of buffered DDR4 on Newegg right now (as a 512 GB kit) for around $3000.
Considering that the maximum amount of RAM you could have installed in any Mac before 2019 was 512 GB, I think that would be reasonable for a Mac Pro. It would be a bit of a step backwards but still reasonable.
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I think the point may be correct, though the details differ. Not so much PCIe for 3rd party cards as
(a) for Apple cards. eg Apple could create the equivalent of their afterburner card. Perhaps two or three versions of this (each incorporating a different mix of IP already on their SoCs), one for video creation, one for 3D creation, one for AI work.
(b) for CXL (ie ability to dramatically increase the memory available to the Mac; slower than the on-device DRAM, but much faster than flash, for use with things like in-memory databases, or even volatile RAM drives). Again this is a solution of little interest to most use cases, but of substantial interest to the three work classes I listed in (a)
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When I get to work, I pull out my laptop, plug it in to the USB-C cable on the widescreen monitor and then get to work. It doesn't require any other power, docking, cables, or keyboard. Same thing happens when I get home. One cable plugin.
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Discrete graphics cards or discrete 3rd PARTY graphics cards...
I don't see a problem with a path that uses an Apple discrete graphics card as I mentioned in my above post.
But supporting 3rd party cards (especially at this super high end) delays the point at which Metal can drop support for everything but Apple Silicon for many many more years, and I can't see that appealing to Apple. Already you can see tensions in Metal, where they want to go in a direction that better exploits their hardware, but are constrained by having to have the API also make sense for AMD.
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Ironic description, that... as it's precisely what used to be taught, once upon a time, as the best formula for effective communicating:
"Tell the audience what you're going to say, say it; then tell them what you've said."
— Dale CarnegieThese days, effective communicating apparently requires you to account for an audience with shorter attention spans... so this advice may be a bit out-dated.
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I suspect that, even today, you can get that down to zero cables plugin!
Connect an aTV to the monitor, and set up the aTV as an external display. (Obviously this doesn't work if you also need the peripherals. Though if you used a mac mini instead of aTV, and only cared about hard drives as the peripherals...
)I'm unaware that anyone has done this, so I have no feel for how well it works; and the extent to which Apple today supports "wireless" monitors seems to be one of their best kept secrets. My personal theory is that this sort of wireless support will be the headline item for the next generation Studio, and it will seem more impressive if everyone thinks it's something new, not something Apple has been rolling out over the past two years or so.
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You missed the Mac Studio Ultra (64 GB/1TB) for $3200 at Costco a couple weeks ago. Oh, wait, it's back! ($800 off retail, $600 off Costco's regular price.)
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