Mac Pro on Back Burner

The real joke is that the ONLY justification for the 2023 Mac Pro was NVME SSD storage on a card being faster than over Thunderbolt... and then the entire release of Sonoma, which was that machine's default OS has a flaw where NVME SSDs would just randomly not be mountable at boot (not even visible as attached to the system), or disappear while under load, requiring full hardware power off and unplug / reset to restore functionality.

The scuttlebut being that this was because the storage subsystem had been replaced with an iOS / iPadOS derived version, and there's no iPad which has slot-based storage. The problem doesn't crop up in any other Mac. The 2019 was also effected.

Apple’s refusal to support third-party GPUs proved deeply short-sighted a decade ago, when the surge in machine learning development happened almost entirely on Linux and Windows. Apple had backed itself into a “thermal corner” with the trash can Mac Pro, making high-performance GPU work virtually impossible on its hardware.

A decade later, not much has changed. Apple Silicon still doesn’t support eGPUs, and while the new Mac Pros include PCIe slots, they still don’t allow GPU upgrades.

Meanwhile, Nvidia is depending on the day the most valuable tech company in the world, and virtually all model training runs on their hardware. No serious AI training is done directly on Macs, and Apple’s Siri and AI divisions are reportedly in disarray. Yet somehow, no one at Apple seems willing to connect the dots.

Take a Mac Studio, put it in a big chassis with airflow and let developer build expensive training hardware and servers with it, to prop up the rest of your ecosystem

Apple should make a "Studio IIci" so to speak. A stretched Studio with a few slots. And not go nuts with expensive options and complicated machined surface treatments of dubious functional value that are wildly different than anything else in the product line.

Just a Studio, stretched to shoebox-like proportions, with a removable lid.

I assume being the only Mac actually assembled in the American federation has something to do for its continuous existence.

Also the nature of M chips makes impossible, or very difficult, to offer memory and gpu add-ons.

Fits a shrinking niche of professional users who also may need it rack mounted.

Apple thinks they can have the same comparative benefits enabled by slot GPUs and more ram by instead improving the integration in their M series chips.

So far it seems their bets are paying off, people actually use Mac Studios for heavy GPU workloads (LLMs) just fine. Is configuring one to that level expensive? Sure, but that's nothing new.

The reason people like Macs for inference is that the shared RAM effectively gives them a large amount of VRAM, not that the GPU is particularly compelling.

When they first announced it I had essentially the same thoughts as the closing paragraph.

The Mac Pro exists for political reasons only at this point. They had to do at least one Apple Silicon version to "complete the transition." Everyone knew Intel was out, everyone strongly suspected that there was no way they could/would support GPUs on an AS Mac Pro, and that's exactly what happened.

They had to know that so few people would be interested in a $3000 PCI enclosure that has no practical use for almost any PCI card that they would sell almost none. And so now they have created an excuse to cancel it.

Maybe they will come back to the table and ask what people really want out of a Mac Pro and give them that, like they did with the 2019 Mac Pro. But that somehow seems unlikely from today's Apple.

The Apple Silicon Mac Pro never made sense. The advantages a Mac Pro might offer over the Mac Studio are PCIe slots and hard-drive bays... but the current Mac Pro doesn't HAVE any hard drive bays (you can get a third-party bracket to add a paltry two drives), and no provision for removable media drives. (There are still people who use optical discs.) And the main use for a PCIe slot would be adding a GPU... but Apple Silicon isn't designed to use add-on GPUs, it's built around the powerful integrated GPU. And that integrated GPU works well precisely because it's literally physically inseparable from the CPU and the RAM.

That leaves the Mac Pro serving a tiny market of people who need PCIe expansion cards for specialty uses, where those expansion cards have Apple Silicon Mac drivers and there isn't a viable Thunderbolt-based alternative. That market's so small that it makes financial sense to build the Mac Pro in the United States, by hand, for the few people that buy them.

The Mac Studio can already handle the most powerful processor Apple cares to make; it doesn't need massive cooling that requires a PC-style case. So it's not like the Mac Pro is "better" in any way other than those mostly-useless slots.

For the vast majority of "pro" use cases, the Mac Studio makes more sense. And for "prosumers," the high-end Mac Mini is usually even more sensible.

Do I wish there were an expandable, upgradable, super-powerful Mac Pro? Sure... but I might as well wish for a pony, too. Apple's not going to make that; there's not enough market to justify it.

I still miss my 2009 Mac Pro. Ignoring specs for the time being, that was probably the best computer I've ever owned.... except maybe for my Macintosh SE/30. 😉

I get that nowadays everything is tightly integrated for maximum performance, so we no longer have upgradeable drives, RAM, GPUs or CPUs. I can buy that there are technical reasons for most of those... though not being able to upgrade internal drives and probably RAM too *really* strikes me as Apple being consumer hostile.

Regardless, though, I don't like using Thunderbolt for all of my expansion needs, because it doesn't work as well.

In fact, just now, I got myself a Thunderbolt 4 hub, and discovered that, for some reason probably relating to electrical interference, I can't plug my headset's wireless dongle into any of the front facing ports of that hub without the connection stuttering so badly as to be useless. That's the sort of issue I associate with USB and Thunderbolt hubs, and not with internal ports.

My current iMac has three external drives, an audio interface, a Thunderbolt hub, and a whole bunch of power adapters, power cables, and data cables all littering my desk and ensuring it will never, ever look neat and tidy. I'd much rather have something like my 2009 Mac Pro where every one of these devices was internal. (Except maybe the audio interface.)

> Apple’s refusal to support third-party GPUs proved deeply short-sighted a decade ago, when the surge in machine learning development happened almost entirely on Linux and Windows. Apple had backed itself into a “thermal corner” with the trash can Mac Pro, making high-performance GPU work virtually impossible on its hardware.
>
>A decade later, not much has changed.

Yea pretty much all AI training is done on Nvidia GPUs and Apple decided they didn’t want to go partners with them anymore. And during that time Nvidia became a more valuable company.

I bought a Windows machine to train an AI model that would’ve taken like 5 years to train on my Macbook Pro. Given the whole AI craze …Apple could have been making a killing on this product if they were willing to support Nvidia GPUs and go partners. They missed a huge opportunity for ego.

@macwhiz wrote: "but Apple Silicon isn't designed to use add-on GPUs"

Seems to me it ought to be easier to integrate add-on GPUs if the add-ons could be used only for ML. Avoids the entire issue of integrating graphics from the Apple Silicon GPUs and the add-on GPU card.

I'm sure there'd be plenty of grumbling from people who would want to use add-on GPUs for graphics, but they probably wouldn't be buying a Mac with slots anyway.

Had to come back to post this link: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/101988

The page is called PCIe cards you CAN install in your Mac Pro. But then read the page. Every item listed is in fact a card you CANNOT install in your Mac Pro. The page should be called PCIe cards you CAN'T install in your Mac Pro.

This is one of the best examples of Apple doublespeak I can find. It's absolutely ridiculous. Nobody who actually wanted the Mac Pro to succeed would have ever signed off on this.