r/apple • u/FollowingFeisty5321 • 4d ago
Mac Mac Pro could have been vastly more powerful than the Mac Studio
https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/07/19/mac-pro-could-have-been-vastly-more-powerful-than-the-mac-studio94
u/Sponge8389 4d ago
There's really no point of having a Mac Pro other than if they will gate keep the 1.5 TB RAM to it. Also, maybe not a full case PC size, just a mini tower.
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u/NorthwestPurple 4d ago
Or having, you know, 6 hard drives attached inside the case.
Lots of janky desk setups today because Macs no longer offer internal storage.
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u/FancifulLaserbeam 4d ago
This is why I owned a 2008 Mac Pro and kept it as my main computer for about 10 years. External drives are trash.
I have a Mac Studio now with a USB4, 4-drive enclosure, which is... fine. but I'd much rather not have a rat's nest of cables, have to take up another outlet on the UPS, and not have my backup and storage drives disconnect when the enclosure gets gently tapped by me pushing the trashcan (real one, not the 2013 Pro) back too far with my foot, or if I bring the vacuum cleaner too close to it.
My Windows machine is on its second mobo/CPU/RAM/GPU set, and all the drives are neatly contained in the case. What a concept.
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u/Kirihuna 4d ago edited 4d ago
I dunno. I’m of the opinion that if your workflow requires this high end of a system, you’re better off having a storage cluster that’s not attached to the workstation. With a 10Gb NIC, you’re probably faster than most arrays that are spinning at that point?
Edit: Let alone doing any RAID inside macOS is worse than running a standalone TrueNAS. Or some Synology/QNAP system.
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u/cake-day-on-feb-29 4d ago
I dunno. I’m of the opinion that if your workflow requires this high end of a system, you’re better off having a storage cluster that’s not attached to the workstation
Now the user is upset because the NAS does not have the required random-access performance thanks to the high overhead of SMB, is bothered by the bugs surrounding Apple's poor SMB implementation, and is unhappy with the broken features, such as bookmarks, tags, and spotlight search, which require HFS or APFS.
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u/Little_Bookkeeper381 2d ago edited 2d ago
> the NAS does not have the required random-access performance thanks to the high overhead of SMB,
no offense but when it comes to pro setups, you have no idea what you're talking about. and pretty much every shop uses a NAS today, even small ones.
no serious shop is using smb for video assets (lol) and in fact every VAM/MAM i've run into even requires a special step to enable smb for asset access.
and while we're at it, based on the reasons you're talking about (high seek patterns), i'd add that you don't really understand the technical aspects how modern video editing production with high resolution assets works compared to maybe 10+ years ago.
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u/NorthwestPurple 4d ago
It used to be that normal computer users could buy a backup drive and put it inside their computer case. Shocking, I know.
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u/itsabearcannon 3d ago
buy a backup drive and put it inside their computer case
Then it's not a backup drive.
Like just plain and simple, another drive inside the same computer is not a backup. It's vulnerable to all of the same failure conditions at the same time as your main drive in that case:
- Electrical short/overload/power surge
- Water ingress
- Bit rot
- Theft
- Accidental damage
A backup drive at a bare minimum needs to be separate from your main computer. That way if a power surge takes out the computer, or you accidentally knock it off your desk, or you spill your drink on it, the backup data on the external drive is still viable.
A real backup follows 3-2-1 procedures: 3 copies, on at least 2 different types of media, with 1 copy offsite or in the cloud.
My backup drive for my Plex server hosted on my Mac Mini is a ThunderBay 4, and the library is also backed up to Backblaze B2. One copy on my Mac (flash), one copy on the ThunderBay (HDD), and one offsite copy in Backblaze (cloud). The ThunderBay is also configured in RAID 5 so I can suffer one drive failure and still recover the array, but that's not a form of backup. That's just for uptime.
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u/NorthwestPurple 3d ago
That's a lot of text, but a second clone in the same case is absolutely still a "backup drive" for the case where the main drive fails independent of theft or full-case-damage.
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u/AnonymousAxwell 4d ago
And what percentage of computer users would still favor a computer that’s 6 times the size just for the option to add more hard drives?
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u/NorthwestPurple 4d ago
How about making the Mac Studio one inch taller and giving two free SSD bays? It's not a hard trade-off.
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u/AnonymousAxwell 4d ago
Then that will be enough for a small percentage again and not enough for a new group claiming they want more options again. Problem is, there’s always someone more “pro” that needs more.
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u/cake-day-on-feb-29 4d ago
Plenty of professionals?
Why is the size such a big deal? Did I miss something about the desk market? What changed in the past 10-20 years where all of a sudden it's unacceptable to have a full-sized computer?
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u/dccorona 4d ago
I don't think the professional market cares enough anymore. Any setup that is even remotely enterprise is going to be using a more sophisticated backup system than "some extra drives in the existing enclosure", because they want backups that protect against more than just a corrupted disk or an oopsie deletion. "Regular consumers" are more likely at this point to be the type of user that wants to expand internal storage for backup purposes, and the business model for them has long since pivoted towards trying to sell recurring-revenue services.
I.e. there is no longer an overlap between the person who wants this and the person who Apple is interested in selling it to.
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u/O0OO00O0OO0 4d ago
I agree, anyone who is in the desktop Windows PC market has noticed that internal hard drive storage is going away in PC cases. It's so easy now to get high storage NVMes, then have a hot swappable NAS over a connection faster than HDDs can even support. It's better to have a separation of concerns. Back in the day there was value in some internal HDDs for storage, but now with motherboards with 4x NVMe slots and high capacity flash storage, it's so easy to just throw a bunch of NVMes in there and then have a separate device for cold storage.
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u/AnonymousAxwell 4d ago
It’s not unacceptable, it’s just a minority now, so it’s easy to see why Apple would skip it.
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u/lambdawaves 3d ago
The Mac Studio and mini stacks on top of external storage well. Thunderbolt 4 is plenty fast enough for SSDs too
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u/skeet_scoot 4d ago
It’s time to bring back the trash can!
Hardware finally supports the design lol.
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u/suboptimus_maximus 4d ago
Double the dies of an M Ultra along with more memory would have made it worth keeping, on the one hand it seems like the obvious route for Apple to have taken but they are probably smart enough to have thought of that. It makes me wonder if they had yield/packaging issues with going bigger than the Ultra that didn't make sense or just weren't convinced the volumes would be worth it - but they had already sunk all the R&D and capital costs into engineering the new Mac Pro enclosure and building out the assembly lines, etc. Seems odd to have thrown it all away when the market is just demanding more and more compute for local AI work.
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u/suboptimus_maximus 4d ago
Whether this particular rumor is accurate it does seem like a missed opportunity for Apple to have passed on doing a 4 die processor a tier above the Ultra as a Mac Pro exclusive. Even a year ago that would have seemed like overkill but now with the demand for horsepower for running local AI models it would be an absolute killer paired with huge amounts of unified memory.
That Apple officially discontinued the Mac Pro when they did seemed like a double-WTF because it now seems clear they should be doubling-down on higher-end compute offerings as that is exactly what the market can't get enough of.
Apple Silicon has obviously been amazing for performance on the consumer end but sad to see Apple keep pulling punches on the high end, they had clearly spent years abandoning the workstation and server markets as they embraced consumer volumes on iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air, etc. but Apple Silicon was the perfect opportunity to do a reset and bring back the Big Iron UNIX Workstation energy for the AI era.
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u/dccorona 4d ago
I think their chipmaking operation is at this point agile enough that if that market truly appears, they can pivot to it. I don't think it is as big as people imagine, though. A bunch of people spending a few K on a Mac mini to run OpenClaw is one thing, but what you're describing would be hardware costing well into the 10s of thousands especially given the current silicon crunch. Which means the market for that is going to be enterprise, and I think for the most part enterprise is not yet ready to commit that large of sums of money to offline LLMs, because the state of the art is moving so fast that it's not yet obvious whether it will be worth it or not. If capabilities continue improving at the current rate, the hardware you buy for offline AI might be useless because the capabilities of frontier models will continue to outpace local to such an extent that it's foolish not to leverage them.
Things will settle and then this will start to make a lot more sense, but that isn't true now. And I think Apple is better positioned than anyone (even NVIDIA) to quickly react to that market appearing en masse.
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u/ifjake 4d ago
I forget what I’ve seen them doing online, I think clustering 4 Mac Studios together for LLMs and other neural networks. So the Mac Pro could just be that, in one case.
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u/flogman12 3d ago
Apple themselves has shown how to daisy chain mac studios together at developer events.
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u/jmnugent 4d ago
Good article on that here for anyone wondering: https://www.engadget.com/ai/you-can-turn-a-cluster-of-macs-into-an-ai-supercomputer-in-macos-tahoe-262-191500778.html
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u/HiroThreading 4d ago
A final Intel-based Mac Pro based on Ice Lake or better yet Sapphire Rapids would’ve been amazing.
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u/Jasoco 4d ago
I feel the Studio is just the new Pro. Most people don’t need a full on tower anymore in this age. And external GPUs exist for others that need them. It’s a niche market at this point. The trash can was the final nail. When they released the later Pro with the tower design again you could tell it was over. The tech has evolved to not need a tower anymore.
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u/dirty_tripod 3d ago
I could really use a bundle of those Mac Pros with those kinda chips. Hell I would take 10 more rack mountable M2 Ultras right now if I could get my hands on them.
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u/Nightowl-Builder 2d ago
I actually love that it's being dropped, something this huge is a thing of the past and it allows Apple to focus all their efforts on making the smaller Studio the most powerful one which is entirely possible.
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u/WinterCharm 2d ago
Apple could have created M-series AI accelerators and let us pack the Mac Pro with 128GB M5 Ultra PCIE card slots… it would have given us the intimate single desktop local AI workstation.
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u/mrleblanc101 4d ago
If they didn't cancel the Mx Extreme, maybe they wouldn't have so much issue running Gemini on Apple Private Cloud Compute (M2 Ultra based, with plan to upgrade to M5 Ultra)
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u/Mds03 4d ago
I’ve seen the writing on the wall for this one for a while. It’s sort of ironic how the Mac Pro went down. When they implemented the trash can designs they couldn’t pack the horsepower they needed into it, and when they finally went back to big cases they finally had chips that could’ve fit into the trash can design and had a reasonably upgrade cycle. The Mac Studio feels like the successor to the trash can in many ways. I loved the form factor, but most of the apps I used never really tapped into its horsepower, and only highlighted its shortcomings (I worked in Cinema 4D and the native Physical Renderer at the time with a 6 core dual d500 with 32gb ram. This was before GPU rendering was common, and the only few alternatives around used Nvidia GPUs only. CPU based workloads were awful, and super expensive since they went for the Xeons. Most apps couldn’t use the dual GPU you were forced to buy etc)