They've been trying to kill the Mac Pro for over a decade. I wonder how long before they backtrack again? It seems like they should at least have a migration path for users who needed the expansion cards the Mac Pro supported. Pushing them to the PC seems pretty bad.
Apple's new "Pro" definition seems more like "Prosumer".
The migration path is Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures (basically eGPU enclosures but you don't have to use a GPU).
> but you don't have to use a GPU
That's a cute way of saying that GPUs aren't supported.
Not only are third party GPUs not supported on apple silicon, but thunderbolt has significantly more latency and lower bandwidth than 'real' PCIe implementations, even ones with similarly cut down lanes like oculink.
Apple tried before to push everything out into external PCIe enclosures and people hated it. Maybe this'll go differently this time, the Mac Studio is certainly a much more compelling offering than the trashcan Mac Pro. But I think this is still a shitty and painful situation for a lot of specific users.
I think “a lot” is heavily exaggerated- more like a few niche users.
The form-factor always felt like a weird fit for Apple Silicon. With the Intel boxes it was understandable; you want a few liters of free space for a couple AMD cards or some transcode hardware. The system was designed to be expandable, and the Mac Pro was the apex of Apple's commitment to that philosophy after bungling the trashcan Mac Pro.
None of the Apple Silicon hardware can seemingly justify this form factor, though. The memory isn't serviceable, PCIe devices aren't really supported, the PSU doesn't need much space, and the cooling can be handled with mobile-tier hardware. Apple's migration path is "my way or the highway" for Mac Pro owners.
I suspect we'll start seeing higher-spec Mac Studio options.
One of those with an M* Ultra, and some sort of Thunderbolt storage expansion would probably cover most of the Pro's use cases. And Apple probably doesn't want to deal with anything more exotic than those.
Can't you already stack 4 Studios? Building a $1,000 case to hold them makes some sort of Apple sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4_RsUxRjKU or something
Their justification for the form factor, when it was released, was that pro users need various PCI cards to interface with some of their equipment, and this would allow them to do that.
It seemed like the guts of the Mac Pro were essentially shoved inside of a box and stuck in the corner of the tower. It would seem like they could decouple it and sell a box that pro users could load cards into (like other companies do for eGPUs). It wouldn’t feel like a very Apple-like setup, but it would function and allow Apple to focus where they want to focus without simply leaving those users behind.
I suppose the other option would be to dispense with the smoke and mirrors and let people slot a Mac Studio right into the Mac Pro tower, so it could be upgraded independently of the tower.
The alternative is people leave the platform or end up with a bunch of Thunderbolt spaghetti. Neither of which seem ideal.
It was always strange the Apple Silicon kept the 1.3kw power supply which was massive overkill.
I always hoped we’d get a consumer version of what they have internally - 10 or 20 or more Apple Silicon chips for 1000 cores or so.
A bunch of the Mac Pro decisions seem to have been more driven by "we have a warehouse of these parts" than "this is what the system needs".
A lot of Apples offerings feel a bit like that actually.
To be expected when lord of the supply chain Tim Cook is running the show.
Apple doesn’t end up with a lot of parts in warehouses because they control the supply chain so well.