[HN Gopher] Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
___________________________________________________________________
Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
Author : bentocorp
Score : 619 points
Date : 2026-03-26 21:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (9to5mac.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (9to5mac.com)
| al_borland wrote:
| 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".
| bigyabai wrote:
| 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.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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
| al_borland wrote:
| 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.
| testing22321 wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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".
| dijit wrote:
| 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.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Apple doesn't end up with a lot of parts in warehouses
| because they control the supply chain so well.
| wmf wrote:
| The migration path is Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures (basically
| eGPU enclosures but you don't have to use a GPU).
| bigyabai wrote:
| > but you don't have to use a GPU
|
| That's a cute way of saying that GPUs aren't supported.
| eigenspace wrote:
| 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.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| I think "a lot" is heavily exaggerated- more like a few
| niche users.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Now everyone that needs classical workstations can finally move
| on into Linux or Windows workloads.
|
| Believe t-shirts at WWDC were not enough.
|
| Thus the workstation market joins OS X Server.
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| For those who don't know what the t-shirt reference is, it's a
| creation by John Siracusa/The Accidental Tech Podcast:
| <https://cottonbureau.com/p/4RUVDA/shirt/mac-pro-believe-dark>.
| nosrepa wrote:
| And I still don't get it.
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| Siracusa--probably best known here for doing fabulous OS X
| reviews for Ars--is a co-host of ATP. He is also known is
| such circles for having Mac Pros, and using them for a long
| time (sometimes by choice, sometimes by circumstance). He
| thinks Apple _should_ make a Mac Pro, not necessarily
| because it 's a big seller, but because he thinks Apple
| should make a "best computer," much in the same way car
| companies might make a car that will never sell but pushes
| engineers, etc.
|
| They made a shirt. It was fun.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Ages ago, when new Mac hardware came out, I'd amuse
| myself by putting together an "ultimate Mac workstation"
| in the configurator --- once upon a time, one could hit 6
| figures pretty easily --- these days, well I panic bought
| a duplicate computer because I was worried a
| chipped/cracked display was going to make it unusable
| (turns out a screen protector has worked thus far).
|
| I agree with the reasoning, and would like to see Apple
| continue to make aspirational hardware, but maybe the
| mainstream stuff is good enough?
| bombcar wrote:
| > maybe the mainstream stuff is good enough?
|
| Even Siracusa admits that - he's found it hard to
| articulate _what_ a true "Mac Pro" would do that you
| can't do with other things.
|
| Back in the heyday of the $100k Mac Pro you could
| certainly _imagine_ it doing things that wouldn 't be
| easily done by anything under $50k, and it would look
| good doing it.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Apple still sells a workstation-type machine: the Mac Studio.
| bigyabai wrote:
| What is this, a workstation for _ants_?
| badc0ffee wrote:
| It's a pizza box, for a 6" pizza.
| wpm wrote:
| It's not at all a workstation type machine. It's a Mac Mini
| with bigger SoCs and better cooling.
| pjmlp wrote:
| No it isn't, it is a mini where you can add audio cards,
| which is basically the only extensions it has available.
|
| Hardly workstation class.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| It's certainly beefier than a Mini - 6 TB5 ports (which can
| drive 6 PCIe 5.0 x4 slots in an enclosure if you want), M3
| Ultra, up to 256GB RAM.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The detail you are missing is that one has to buy an
| additional enclosure and the set of PCI cards is actually
| limited, hardly workstation class.
|
| This is a workstation,
|
| https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-
| computers/precision-...
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Interesting that all the memory options are _" no longer
| available"_.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That is an AI bros problem that will affect most of the
| industry, not only workstations.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Damn, that Dell case, fancy Xeon processor and nVidia
| card must really be worth a lot, because the rest of what
| you get for $9k is 32 GB RAM, a 512 GB SSD, and a Windows
| 11 Pro license, all while consuming hundreds of watts of
| power.
| w-m wrote:
| While the trash can generation was somewhat present and around, I
| don't think I ever saw a cheese grater in the flesh. Did it have
| any users? Were there any actual useful expansion cards? Did
| anybody continue buying this at all, after it didn't get the M3
| Ultra bump, that the Mac Studio got last year?
| m463 wrote:
| The cheese grater mac pros were very popular, in that people
| got them and continued to use them.
|
| The most notable feature was that there were mac-specific
| graphics cards, and you could also run PC graphics cards
| (without a nice boot screen). They had a 1.4kw power supply I
| believe, and there was extra pcie power for higher-end graphics
| cards. You could upgrade the memory, add up to 6 or more sata
| hard disks (2 in dvd slot). You could run windows, dual booting
| if you wanted and apple supported the drivers.
|
| The 2013 was kind of a joke. small and quiet, but expansion was
| minimal.
|
| 2019 looked beefy, but the expansion was more like a cash
| register for apple, not really democratic. There were 3rd party
| sata hard disk solutions,
|
| the 2023 model was basically a joke. I think maybe the pcie
| slots were ok for nvme cards, not a lot else (unless apple made
| it).
|
| nowadays an apple computer is more like an iphone - apple would
| prefer if everything was welded shut.
| hbn wrote:
| > nowadays an apple computer is more like an iphone - apple
| would prefer if everything was welded shut.
|
| Funny timing to say that
|
| https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-
| most-r...
| waz0wski wrote:
| I just replaced a 2009 MacPro
|
| It had many hardware upgrades over the years - upgraded CPUs,
| 128GB RAM, 4TB NVME storage, a modern AMD GPU, USB3/c,
| thunderbolt, etc
|
| The only reason it got replaced is because it became too much
| of a PITA to keep modern OSX running on it (via OCLP)
|
| Replaced with an M4 Max Mac Studio, which is a nice and faster
| machine but with no ability to upgrade anything and much worse
| hardware resale value on M-series I'll have to replace it in
| 2-3 years
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| I'm a former 4,1 user, myself -- replaced with an M2Pro mini
| Jan 2023 (finally retired fully 2025).
|
| Absolutely recommend you purchase the 4-bay Terramaster
| external enclosure -- gives you four SATA slots that are hot-
| swappable (unlike MacPro's). 10gbps via USB-C.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Are SMART attributes independently readable on that? (Or
| any multi-drive USB-C enclosures?)
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| >or _any_ USB-C enclosure
|
| SMART is supported on my external Acasis nVME.
|
| ----
|
| I have two TerraMaster sledbads; this one [typing] is
| years older [only 5gbps, macOS Ventura] and shows `SMART:
| not supported` [1]
|
| [1] It's mirrored WD_blacks (RAID1) so I have at least
| some redundancy... I know: _a RAID does NOT count as
| "backed-up"_.
|
| ----
|
| Within an hour I'll have checked the newer system (I
| suspect it'll be similar -- _definitely faster!_ ).
|
| #TodayIlearnt
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| It does not appear that SMART is supported on either
| version of my TerraMaster enclosures.
|
| Still an inexpensive solution to help ease your
| transition away from MacPro"5,1"land.
|
| As USB-C is a physical form factor (capable of supporting
| multiple protocols), I would think that the ability to
| have multidrive external SMART support would be up to the
| vendor's choice of datachip/datastream. Again: my Acasis
| _does_ support SMART for nVMEs.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| If you were using a 2009 Mac Pro for work until a year or two
| ago then you seriously need to think about how much your time
| is worth and how much of your time you were wasting by
| "saving money" on not buying a new computer.
|
| If you're self employed, the cost of equipment and
| depreciation make hanging on to that 2009 system even more of
| a poor choice.
|
| If you were still using a 2009 system I don't see why you'd
| "have to replace in 2-3 years."
| bombcar wrote:
| At the price of the Mac Pro you could buy _two_ Mac Studios
| (at least) - one today and one three or more years in the
| future.
| macintux wrote:
| My first non-Linux PC was a cheese grater, way overkill for my
| needs but served me well for many years.
| dangus wrote:
| > Serviceable, repairable, upgradable Macs are officially a thing
| of the past.
|
| Well, not exactly. Apple's desktop Macs actually all have modular
| SSD storage, and third parties sell upgrade kits. And it's not
| like Thunderbolt is a slouch as far as expandability.
|
| I can see why the Mac Pro is gone. Yeah, it has PCIe slots...that
| I don't really think anyone is using. It's not like you can drop
| an RTX 5090 in there.
|
| The latest Mac Pro didn't have upgradable memory so it wasn't
| much different than a Mac Studio with a bunch of empty space
| inside.
|
| The Mac Studio is very obviously a better buy for someone looking
| for a system like that. It's just hard to imagine who the Mac Pro
| is for at its pricing and size.
|
| I think what happened is that the Studio totally cannibalized Mac
| Pro sales.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > Apple's desktop Macs actually all have modular SSD storage
|
| "Modular" does not mean that it's serviceable, repairable or
| upgradable. Apple's refusal to adopt basic M.2 spec is a pretty
| glaring example of that.
| internet2000 wrote:
| > Apple's refusal to adopt basic M.2 spec
|
| I get the ideological angle, but in practical terms that's
| not a barrier: https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-apple-
| ssd-adapter.html...
| bigyabai wrote:
| This is the USB-C dongle argument all over again, but with
| a proprietary connector that a total of one (1) company
| uses.
| dijit wrote:
| Honestly I don't care, but Apples SSDs don't have a
| storage controller on them, and those adapters are
| designed to "bypass" the controller on m.2 drives.
|
| You can argue that it's different for the sake of being
| different, but
|
| A) I personally don't always hold that monopoly is a good
| thing, even if we agree m.2 is fairly decent it doesn't
| make it universally the best.
|
| B) I'd make the argument that Apple is competing very
| well with performance and reliability..
|
| C) IIRC there are some hardware guarantees that the new
| filesystem needs to be aware of (for wear levelling and
| error-correction) and those would be obfuscated by a
| controller that thinks its smarter than the CPU and OS.
|
| if we're talking about Intel era Macs then that
| proprietary connector predates M.2 entirely and is
| actually even thinner and smaller (which is pretty
| important when the primary use-cases is thin-and-lights);
| though I suppose that the adapter fits is a sign that it
| would have been possible to use a larger connector...
| bigyabai wrote:
| That is an absolutely awful argument against what I just
| said. I can tell that you don't care.
|
| Tens of thousands of mini PC and laptop boards ship with
| multiple M.2 slots. Apple can use _both_ connectors, with
| the _exact same_ caveats that normal M.2 SSDs have on
| ordinary filesystems. Apple does not have to enable swap,
| zram, or other high-wear settings on macOS if they are
| uncomfortable with the inconsistency of M.2 drives. Now,
| _I 'd_ make the argument that people don't complain about
| APFS wear on external SSDs, but maybe I'm wrong and macOS
| _does_ have some fancy bypass saving thousands of TBW
| /year.
|
| Whatever the case is, "the annoying thing is competitive"
| was not a justification for the Lightning cable when it
| reached the gallows. It did not compete, it specifically
| protected Apple from the competitive pressure of higher-
| capacity connectors. The same is true of Apple's SSD
| racket and the decade-old meme of $400 1tb NVMe drives.
| dijit wrote:
| I don't buy that argument, "a PC by any other name" is
| what made intel mac's somewhat uncompetitive when
| compared to the M-series laptops: which are currently
| dominating with total vertical integration of the OS and
| hardware.
|
| Also: All things being equal, the lightening connector
| was technically superior to USB-C _and_ arrived much
| earlier.. so it 's somewhat on the same path.
|
| USB-C succeeded due to a confluence of;
|
| A) Being a _standard_ people can get behind. (lightning
| was, of course, much more awkwardly licensed)
|
| B) Lightning never got a sufficient uplift from USB-2.0
| performance.
|
| C) The EU eventually killed lightening through
| regulation.
|
| It was, however, smaller, more durable and (as mentioned)
| earlier.
|
| I'm totally not against our new USB-C everywhere
| situation w.r.t. phones, but if anything it reinforces
| the point: The technically superior thing being too
| proprietary caused its death (despite being early).
| wtallis wrote:
| Those are all for Intel Macs, and not even the recent Intel
| Macs. You can't use a passive adapter to put a NVMe SSD
| into a current Mac like you could a decade ago, because
| back then the only thing non-standard about the SSD was the
| connector. Now most of the SSD controller itself has moved
| to the SoC and trying to put an off the shelf SSD into the
| current slot makes no more sense than trying to put an SSD
| into a DIMM slot.
| kelnos wrote:
| It's sad that "you can replace the SSD" is in some people's
| eyes "serviceable, repairable, and upgradeable".
|
| We should demand better of our computer-manufacturing
| overlords.
|
| > _It's not like you can drop an RTX 5090 in there._
|
| Why not? Oh, right, because Apple won't let you. Sad.
| dangus wrote:
| I didn't phrase myself very well. What I'm saying is that the
| loss of the Mac Pro didn't reduce the repairability or
| modularity at all in the product lineup.
|
| It was exactly as modular as the Mac mini and Mac Studio.
|
| The only difference is that it had some PCIe slots that
| basically had no use since you couldn't throw a GPU in there,
| and because thunderbolt 5 exists.
|
| Yeah, sure, there were some niche PCIe things that two people
| probably used. Hence the discontinuation.
|
| I am an ex-Mac user, I own a Framework. Don't worry, you're
| preaching to the choir.
| bombcar wrote:
| Apparently the Neo is surprisingly repairable - in that parts
| can be replaced, not that you can buy stuff at Microcenter or
| Fry's (RIP) and shove them in.
| wpm wrote:
| Thunderbolt absolutely is a slouch.
|
| Every PCIe card I have requires it's own $150+ PCIe to
| Thunderbolt Dock and its own picoPSU plus 12V power supply.
|
| External PCIe is convenient for portables. Not for desktops.
| It's a piss-poor replacement for a proper PCIe slot.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Why don't you just get a multi-slot PCIe box?
| brailsafe wrote:
| Pour one out for John Siracusa
| sgerenser wrote:
| I guess not enough people bought the shirt:
| https://cottonbureau.com/p/4RUVDA/shirt/mac-pro-believe-dark...
| bombcar wrote:
| Is it strange that only _now_ do I want the shirt?
| brailsafe wrote:
| I think we're all there with you :)
| wpm wrote:
| They better do another run.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Mac Pro... We Believed
| philistine wrote:
| Or too many people bought the shirt instead of a Mac Pro.
| bombcar wrote:
| The shirt _was_ a bit cheaper. And probably a bit faster
| processing, too.
| jryio wrote:
| If you're reading this, we're sorry John!
| longislandguido wrote:
| Here's an interesting fact, one of the more famous and
| fanatical fanboy Mac Pro users was late radio host Rush
| Limbaugh (he owned four of them), who dedicated an entire
| segment to the topic on his normally all-politics show when
| Apple dropped the ball on Thunderbolt back in the day.
| ImJasonH wrote:
| That is an interesting fact indeed!
|
| https://macdailynews.com/2012/06/12/rush-limbaugh-okay-
| apple...
| TMWNN wrote:
| Tom Clancy was a big Mac fan, too.
| kuekacang wrote:
| F
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| But what will we do without "this doesn't work on intel macOS"
| corner!?
| brailsafe wrote:
| It'll be replaced with an extended "shill arbitrary Apple
| product corner", iPhones r still interesting right, or should
| we replace our cars again!?
|
| Although to be fair the latest two eps have been refreshingly
| technical
| internet2000 wrote:
| I hope I can get a cheap one on Craigslist eventually, just for
| the novelty. It looks so cool.
| longislandguido wrote:
| Apple betrayed their pro customers years ago--right around the
| time they went to version X of the Pro apps--it's all been a slow
| death by a thousand paper cuts since then.
|
| The money's all in selling phones to teen girls now, and taking
| their mafia cut of app store sales.
| IFC_LLC wrote:
| I think that's an expected thing.
|
| G5 was the thing. And companies were buying G5 and other macs
| like that all the time, because you were able to actually extend
| it with video cards and some special equipment.
|
| But now we have M chips. You don't need video for M chips. You
| kinda do, but truthfully, it's cheaper to buy a beefier Mac than
| to install a video card.
|
| Pro was a great thing for designers and video editors, those
| freaks who need to color-calibrate monitors. And right now even
| mini works just fine for that.
|
| And as for extensions - gone are the days of PCIe. Audio cards
| and other specialized equipment works and lives just fine on
| USB-C and Thunderbolt.
|
| I remember how many months I've spent trying to make Creative
| Labs Sound Blaster to work on my 486 computer. At that time you
| had to have a card to extend your system. Right now I'm using
| Scarlett 2i2 from Focusrite. It works over USB-C with my iPhone,
| iPad and Mac. DJIs mics work just as good.
|
| Damn, you can buy Oscilloscope that works over USB-C or network.
|
| It's not the Mac's or Apple's fault. We are actually live in the
| age where systems are quite independent and do not require direct
| installations.
| Lucasoato wrote:
| Scarlett 2i2 has been amazing for me, I'd say unbeatable in
| terms of quality/price ratio.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| > gone are the days of PCIe.
|
| My GPU, NVMe drives and motherboard might disagree.
| aprilnya wrote:
| - GPU is integrated into the SoC - Surprisingly, it is
| possible to plug a drive into a TB/USB port
|
| ...so what do you actually need PCIe for?
| HeWhoLurksLate wrote:
| but what about _second_ GPU?
| wtallis wrote:
| Multiple GPUs was _tried_ , by the whole industry
| including Apple (most notably with the trash can Mac
| Pro). Despite significant investment, it was ultimately a
| failure for consumer workloads like gaming, and was
| relegated to the datacenter and some very high-end
| workstations depending on the workload.
|
| Multi-GPU has recently experienced a resurgence due to
| the discovery of new workloads with broader appeal
| (LLMs), but that's too new to have significantly
| influenced hardware architectures, and LLM inference
| isn't the most natural thing to scale across many GPUs.
| Everybody's still competing with more or less the
| architectures they had on hand when LLMs arrived, with
| new low-precision matrix math units squeezed in wherever
| room can be made. It's not at all clear yet what the
| long-term outcome will be in terms of the balance between
| local vs cloud compute for inference, whether there will
| be any local training/fine-tuning at all, and which use
| cases are ultimately profitable in the long run. All of
| that influences whether it would be worthwhile for Apple
| to abandon their current client-first architecture that
| standardizes on a single integrated GPU and omits/rejects
| the complexity of multi-GPU setups.
| jltsiren wrote:
| High-end Macs have moved to PCIe 5.0 speeds in their
| internal drives. Thunderbolt 5 is not fast enough to get
| the same performance from external ones.
|
| Thunderbolt is also too slow for higher-end networks. A
| single port is already insufficient for 100-gigabit speeds.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| When people talk about 100gigabit networks for Macs, im
| really curious what kind of network you run at home and
| how much money you spent on it. Even at work I'm
| generally seeing 10gigabit network ports with 100gigabit+
| only in data centers where macs don't have a presence
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I work in media production and I have the same thought
| constantly. Hell I curse in church as far as my industry
| is concerned because I find 2.5 to be fine for most of
| us. 10 absolutely.
| nine_k wrote:
| I suppose the throughput is not the key, latency is. When
| you split ann operation that normally ran within one
| machine between two machines, anything that crosses the
| boundary becomes orders of magnitude slower. Even with
| careful structuring, there are limits of how little and
| how rarely you can send data between nodes.
|
| I suppose that splitting an LLM workload is pretty
| sensitive to that.
| AdamN wrote:
| 100gbps is going to be for mesh networks supporting
| clusters (4 Mac Studios let's just say) - not for LAN
| type networks (unless it's in an actual datacenter).
| jltsiren wrote:
| Local AI is probably the most common application these
| days.
|
| Apple recently added support for InfiniBand over
| Thunderbolt. And now almost all decent Mac Studio
| configurations have sold out. Those two may be connected.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Apple recently added support for InfiniBand over
| Thunderbolt._
|
| TIL:
|
| * https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3
| 205-l...
|
| Or maybe I forgot:
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248644
| adrian_b wrote:
| 100 Gb/s Ethernet is likely to be expensive, but dual-
| port 25 Gb/s Ethernet NICs are not much more expensive
| than dual-port 10 Gb/s NICs, so whenever you are not
| using the Ethernet ports already included by a
| motherboard it may be worthwhile to go to a higher speed
| than 10 Gb/s.
|
| If you use dual-port NICs, you do not need a high-speed
| switch, which may be expensive, but you can connect
| directly the computers into a network, and configure them
| as either Ethernet bridges or IP routers.
| wpm wrote:
| Video capture
|
| I/O expansion
|
| Networking
| pjmlp wrote:
| To have lots of them plugged together, high end audio
| cards, electronics integrations, disks with having cables
| all over the place.
| gizajob wrote:
| Things that aren't graphics cards, such very high bandwidth
| video capture cards and any other equipment that needs a
| lot of lanes of PCI data at low latency.
| rayiner wrote:
| The top Mac Studio has six thunderbolt 5 ports, each of which
| is a PCIe 4.0 x4 link. Each is a 8GB/sec link in each
| direction, which is a lot. Going from x16 down to x4 has less
| than a 10% hit on games: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/co
| mments/sbegpb/gpu_in_pci...
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Gaming isn't what people are using Mac Studios for.
| Thunderbolt also isn't a substitute for OCuLink.
| rayiner wrote:
| Sure, but it's probably reflective of the fact that GPUs
| generally aren't PCIe-bandwidth bound. Also, TB5 and
| Oculink2 both use PCI 4.0 x4 links.
| angoragoats wrote:
| Oculink is generally faster than TB5 despite them both
| using PCIe 4.0, because Oculink provides direct PCIe
| access whereas Thunderbolt has to route all PCIe traffic
| through its controller. The benchmarks show that the
| overhead introduced by the TB5 controller slows down GPU
| performance.
| wtallis wrote:
| It's not just the controllers; the Thunderbolt protocol
| itself imposes different speed limits. The bit rates used
| by Thunderbolt aren't the same as PCIe, and PCIe traffic
| gets encapsulated in Thunderbolt packets.
| rayiner wrote:
| Apple Silicon has an integrated thunderbolt controller so
| that should have less latency than PCs that use a
| discrete thunderbolt controller.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Many recent laptop CPUs from Intel and AMD have
| integrated Thunderbolt controllers (i.e. USB 4), so that
| has not been a difference for a long time.
| angoragoats wrote:
| Maybe; I'm unable to find any benchmarks that
| specifically compare PCs with TB to Macs to test this.
| But there is certainly still overhead with TB no matter
| what, and therefore it'll never be as fast as Oculink.
| izacus wrote:
| That's just blatantly wrong, the performance loss of GPUs
| is very well documented and gets worse as you go towards
| higher end models. We're talking 30%+ loss of performance
| here.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Um, I have an M3 Ultra 512GB on my desk for development.
| Love me some Baldur's Gate 3, everything turned up to
| 11...
| mrheosuper wrote:
| Your example uses GTX1080, which is a very old GPU. Current
| flagship consumer GPU will take a harder hit on low
| bandwidth PCIE.
| rayiner wrote:
| Here's more recent HW:
| https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/impact-of-gpu-
| pci...
|
| This is an RTX4080.
|
| "In the more common situations of reducing PCI-e
| bandwidth to PCI-e 4.0 x8 from 4.0 x16, there was little
| change in content creation performance: There was only an
| average decrease in scores of 3% for Video Editing and
| motion graphics. In more extreme situations (such as
| running at 4.0 x4 / 3.0 x8), this changed to an average
| performance reduction of 10%."
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| A 10% performance reduction seems like a lot to be
| leaving on the table.
| rayiner wrote:
| Not really.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| The article is nearly 3 years old and the 4080 is not
| even top of the line at the written time.
|
| Still, 10% in difference is still considerable, almost
| gen-to-gen difference
| zozbot234 wrote:
| PCIe 4.0 x4 is going to be a huge bottleneck, even recent
| SSDs have more throughput (they use PCIe 5.0) never mind
| GPUs.
| matja wrote:
| Yeah 80GB/s total I/O bandwidth is a lot for a Mac, but
| desktop PCs have been doing 1TB/s (128x PCIe5) for years
| (Threadripper etc).
| rayiner wrote:
| Sure. And lots of people need all that I/O. But my point
| is that it's not like the Mac Studio has no I/O. The
| outgoing Mac Pro only has 24 total lanes of PCIe 4.0
| going to the switch chip that's connected to all the PCI
| slots. The advent of externally route PCIe is a
| development in the last few years that may have factored
| into the change in form factor.
| tylerflick wrote:
| > gone are the days of PCIe
|
| Thunderbolt is external PCIe.
| eigenspace wrote:
| No, oculink is external PCIe.
|
| Thunderbolt can kinda-sorta mimic PCIe, but it needs to chop
| up the PCIe signal into smaller packets, transmit them and
| then put them back together and this introduces a big jump in
| latency, even when bandwidth can be rather high.
|
| For many applications this isn't a big deal, but for others
| it causes major problems (gaming being the big one, but
| really anything that's latency sensitive is going to suffer a
| lot).
| angoragoats wrote:
| > gone are the days of PCIe
|
| This is a wild and very wrong take.
|
| Just about every single consumer computer shipped today uses
| PCIe. If you were referring to only only the physical PCIe
| slots, that's wrong too: the vast majority of desktop
| computers, servers, and workstations shipped in 2025 had
| physical PCIe slots (the only ones that didn't were Macs and
| certain mini-PCs).
|
| The 2023 Mac Pro was dead on arrival because Apple doesn't let
| you use PCIe GPUs in their systems.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Thunderbolt is PCIe running over a cable.
| angoragoats wrote:
| Yes, I know; this is part of what I was implying when I
| said "Just about every single consumer computer shipped
| today uses PCIe."
|
| I don't understand how this is a response to anything I
| said.
| labcomputer wrote:
| Sure, with expensive line drivers to send the data 1+
| meters, instead of 10ish cm. And with only 2 channels
| instead of up to 16.
| hazz99 wrote:
| Plus modern interconnects like CXL are also layers on top of
| PCIe, and USB4 supports PCIe tunnelling. PCIe is a big
| collection of specifications, the physical/link/transaction
| layers can be mixed and matched and evolved separately.
|
| I don't see it disappearing, at most we'll get PCIe 6/7/etc.
| johnebgd wrote:
| My post Mortem sentiments exactly. The lack of Nvidia GPU
| support for the M series Mac Pro models kneecapped the
| platform for professionals. If Apple had included that in
| those they'd be the defacto professional workstation for many
| more folks working in AI tech.
| chatmasta wrote:
| On the other hand it forced developers to invest more in
| Metal which looks like an investment starting to bear
| fruit.
| sundvor wrote:
| Yup the 4090 and SoundBlaster ZXR in my AM5 7800X3D system
| would both like to upvote your reply.
| Arcanum-XIII wrote:
| Sound card works fine on USB2 (RME for example has cards on
| USB2 that can manage 30/30 io at 192khz without issue at
| low latency if you have the CPU to deal with the load)
|
| With USB3 you have 94 i/o...
|
| For years pci has not been mandatory for audio. UAD,
| Apogee, RME and other high end brands will push you to
| them. Or even only provide them as usb device... even
| Thunderbolt is not needed here.
|
| And that's been the case for a while! My Fireface UC from
| 15 years ago can deal with 16 channels at 96khz at 256
| sample. On PC and Mac.
| wpm wrote:
| Then they should start putting internal high powered USB
| ports _inside_ the case where I can literally bolt this
| shit into place because my desk is a _goddamn mess_ of
| cables and dongles and boxes that don 't stack or
| interlock or interface at all and I am so so utterly
| tired of being gaslit into beliving that they're just as
| good as a fucking slot.
| balamatom wrote:
| Sounds like a 9.5" mini rack could help with the
| stacking, see Geerling.
| Intermernet wrote:
| Personally, I'd love to see / read / hear more about the
| way RME do what they do. I know they basically update the
| fpga on the devices in lock step with the drivers, which
| allows them to do all sorts of magic (low CPU usage, zero
| latency recording of each raw channel being one of them)
| but I'd love an interview or article from some of the
| hardware and software people from RME. They have been
| rock solid and basically future proof for decades and I
| think the entire hardware and software industries could
| learn something from the way they do things.
|
| Incredible products, definitely worth the premium.
| gizajob wrote:
| Compared to video data and the speed the CPU is running
| at, audio trickles in at a snails pace.
| sundvor wrote:
| I have about 14 or 15 USB devices in addition to my 4
| monitors, and whilst I'm sure you're right I'm very happy
| to have a high quality soundcard that is _not_ part of
| that mix.
| wtallis wrote:
| > This is a wild and very wrong take.
|
| That's what happens when you quote only part of a statement.
| Taken in context, it was referring to a very real decline in
| expansion cards. Now that NICs (for WiFi) and SSDs have been
| moved into their own compact specialized slots, and Ethernet
| and audio have been standard integrated onto the motherboard
| itself for decades, the regular PCIe slots are vestigial.
| They simply are not widely used anymore for expanding a PC
| with a variety of peripherals (that era was already mostly
| over by the transition from 32-bit PCIe to PCIe).
|
| Across all desktop PCs, the most common number of slots
| filled is one (a single GPU), and the average is surely less
| than one (systems using zero slots and relying on integrated
| graphics must greatly outnumber systems using more than one
| slot).
|
| Even GPUs themselves are a horrible argument in favor of PCIe
| slots. The form factor is wildly unsuitable for a high-power
| compute accelerator, because it's ultimately derived from a
| 1980s form factor that prioritized total PCB area above all
| else, and made zero provisions for cards needing a heatsink
| and fan(s).
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Ethernet and audio have been standard integrated onto the
| motherboard itself for decades
|
| Unless the one it comes with isn't as fast as the one you
| want, or they didn't integrate one at all, or you need more
| than one.
|
| > Across all desktop PCs, the most common number of slots
| filled is one (a single GPU), and the average is surely
| less than one (systems using zero slots and relying on
| integrated graphics must greatly outnumber systems using
| more than one slot).
|
| There is an advantage in having an _empty_ slot because
| then you can put something in it.
|
| Your SSD gets full, do you want to buy one which is twice
| as big and then pay twice as much and screw around
| transferring everything, or do you want to just add a
| second one? But then you need an empty slot.
|
| You bought a machine with an iGPU and the CPU is fine but
| the iGPU isn't cutting it anymore. Easy to add a discrete
| GPU if you have somewhere to put it.
|
| The time has come to replace your machine. Now you have to
| transfer your 10TB of junk once. You don't need 100Gbps
| ethernet 99% of the time, but using the builtin gigabit
| ethernet for this is more than 24 hours of waiting. A pair
| of 100Gbps cards cuts that >24 hours down to ~15 minutes.
| If the old and new machines have an empty slot.
| Orygin wrote:
| My motherboard has 3 16x PCIe slots, but realistically
| only one is used for the GPU as the other two are under
| the mastodon of a cooler needed by the GPU. Can't use a
| 100G network card if I can't fit it under the GPU. Can't
| not use the GPU as I don't have an iGPU in my CPU.
|
| He's not advocating from removing PCIe slots, but in
| practice, it's needed by way less consumers than before.
| There's probably more computers being sold right now
| without any PCIe slot than there are with more than 1.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > My motherboard has 3 16x PCIe slots, but realistically
| only one is used for the GPU as the other two are under
| the mastodon of a cooler needed by the GPU.
|
| Discrete GPUs generally consume two PCI slots, not three,
| and even the mATX form factor allows for four PCI slots
| (ATX is seven), which gives board makers an obvious thing
| to do. Put one x16 slot at the top and the other(s) lower
| down and use the space immediately under the top x16 slot
| for an x1 slot which is less inconvenient to block or M.2
| slot which can be used even if there is a GPU hanging
| over it. This configuration is currently very common.
|
| It also makes sense to put one of the x16 slots at the
| very bottom because it can either be used for a fast
| single height card (>1Gb network or storage controller)
| or a GPU in a chassis with space below the board (e.g.
| mATX board in ATX chassis) without blocking another slot.
| whalesalad wrote:
| it's not just about pcie, it's socketed memory and disks. I
| guess disks are just pcie technically - but memory sockets are
| great. hell, in the pro chassis I am surprised they didn't opt
| for a socketed cpu that could be upgraded.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The latest M2-based Mac Pro did not take socketed memory
| AIUI.
| angoragoats wrote:
| This is correct; Apple has refused to implement socketed
| memory on any M-series machine.
| oefrha wrote:
| Does M5 series have better video encoding chip/chiplet/whatever
| it is called than M4 series? Because while I'm happy with my M4
| Pro overall, H.264 encoding performance with videotoolbox_h264
| is disappointingly basically exactly the same as a previous
| 2018 model Intel Mac mini, and blown out of water by nvenc on
| any mid to high end Nvidia GPU released in the last half-
| decade, maybe even full decade. And video encoding is a pretty
| important part of video editing workflow.
| zamadatix wrote:
| If you mean editing ProRes is a better fit, if you mean final
| export software always beats hardware encoders in terms of
| quality, if you mean mass h.264 transcoding a Mac workstation
| is probably not the right place though.
| labcomputer wrote:
| > And as for extensions - gone are the days of PCIe. Audio
| cards and other specialized equipment works and lives just fine
| on USB-C and Thunderbolt.
|
| Grumble grumble. Well, there _used_ to more than audio cards,
| back before the _first_ time Apple canceled the Mac Pro and
| released the 2013 Studio^H^H Trash Can^H^H Mac Pro.
|
| Then everyone stopped writing Mac drivers because why bother.
| So when they brought the PCIe Pro back in 2019, there wasn't
| much to put in it besides a few Radeon cards that Apple
| commissioned.
|
| The nice thing about PCIe is the low latency, so you can build
| all sorts of fun data acquisition and real time control
| applications. It's also much cheaper because you don't need
| multi-gigabit SERDES that can drive a 1m line. That's why
| LabVIEW (originally a Mac exclusive) and NI-DAQ no longer exist
| on Mac.
|
| USB-C oscilloscopes work because the peripheral contains _all_
| the hardware, so it doesn 't particularly matter that the
| device->host latency is high. They also don't require much
| bandwidth because triggering happens inside the peripheral, and
| only the triggered waveform record is sent a few dozen times
| per second.
|
| > It's not the Mac's or Apple's fault. We are actually live in
| the age where systems are quite independent and do not require
| direct installations.
|
| It is, and we don't. Maybe you don't notice it, but others do.
| rkagerer wrote:
| > USB-C oscilloscopes work because the peripheral contains
| _all_ the hardware, so it doesn 't particularly matter that
| the device->host latency is high.
|
| Yeah, that's basically the way accessories have gone.
| Powerful mcu's and soc's have gotten cheap enough to make it
| viable. Makes me a little sad though, I liked having low
| latency "GPIO's" straight to software running on my PC (but
| I'm thinking as far back as the parallel port... love how
| simple that was).
| jmalicki wrote:
| It's not just that - anything working with analog signals
| benefits hugely from not living inside the complete EM
| interference nightmare of the computer case.
| buccal wrote:
| Well there is
| https://www.crowdsupply.com/eevengers/thunderscope
|
| With USB4/TB you can get quite far in both latency and
| throughput. Actually there are network adapters with TB
| connection that are just TB to PCIe adapters and PCIe network
| card.
| TheCondor wrote:
| I'm at peace with the memory and PCIe basically flows over
| thundebolt. At one point external gpus were a thing. I think
| what I'd really love would be a couple or few m.2 slots in my
| studio for storage expansion.
| openports wrote:
| R.I.P. to the cheese grater
| lapcat wrote:
| The 2013 trash can was the end of the Mac Pro. It was never the
| same after that. The 2012 and earlier Mac Pros were awesome. I
| had a 2010 model. Here's what I loved:
|
| * Multiple hard drive bays for easy swapping of disks, with a
| side panel that the user could open and close
|
| * Expandable RAM
|
| * Lots of ports, including audio
|
| * The tower took up no desktop space
|
| * It was relatively affordable, starting at $2500. Many software
| developers had one. (The 2019 and later Mac Pros were insanely
| expensive, starting at $6000.)
|
| The Mac Studio is affordable, but it lacks those other features.
| It has more ports than other Macs but fewer in number and kind
| than the old Mac Pro, because the Mac Studio is a pointlessly
| small desktop instead of floor tower.
| __loam wrote:
| The studio is also like 5x as fast as those machines.
| lapcat wrote:
| What's your point? Of course processors have gotten a lot
| faster between 2012 and 2025.
|
| I was talking about the form factor of the machine.
| longislandguido wrote:
| That's when they stopped designing computers for the pro market
| and started selling mid-century Danish furniture that can also
| edit videos.
|
| I knew it was all over when third party companies had to
| develop the necessarily-awkward rack mount kits for those
| contraptions. If Apple actually cared about or understood their
| pro customers, they would have built a first party solution for
| their needs. Like sell an actual rack-mount computer again--the
| horror!
|
| Instead, an editing suite got what looked like my bathroom
| wastebasket.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| When it was introduced, Apple said the trash can was a
| revolution in cooling design.
|
| Then they said they couldn't upgrade the components because of
| heat. Everyone knows that wasn't true.
|
| By the time Apple said they had issues with it in 2017, AMD
| were offering 14nm GCN4 and 5 graphics (Polaris and Vega)
| compared to the 28nm GCN1 graphics in the FirePro range. Intel
| had moved from Ivy Bridge to Skylake for Xeons. And if they
| wanted to be really bold (doubtful, as the move to ARM was
| coming) then the 1st gen Epyc was on the market too.
|
| Moore's Law didn't stop applying for 6 years. They had options
| and chose to abandon their flagship product (and most loyal
| customers) instead.
| dijit wrote:
| The biggest issue was actually that the Mac Pro was designed
| specifically for dual GPUs- in the era of SLI this made some
| sense, but once that technology was abandoned it was a
| technological dead-end.
|
| If you take one apart you'll see why, it's not the case that
| you could have ever swapped around the components to make it
| dual-CPU instead; it really was "dual GPU or bust".
|
| Somewhat ironically, in todays ML ecosystem, that
| architecture would probably do great. Though I doubt it could
| possibly do better than what the M-series is doing by itself
| using unified memory.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| I'll admit that while I've used the trash can but never
| taken it apart myself. But I can't imagine it would have
| been impossible to throw 2x Polaris 10 GPUs on the
| daughterboards in place of the FirePros.
| dijit wrote:
| I think on a technical level you're right, but you need
| to run two of them and they'd need a custom design like
| so:
|
| https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/RQIAAOSwxKFoTHe3/s-l1200.j
| pg
|
| For what is essentially a dead-end technology, I'm
| somewhat doubtful people would have bought it (since the
| second GPU is going to be idle and add to the cost
| massively).
|
| the CPU being upgraded would have been much easier though
| I think.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| That's the crux, I think.
|
| Apple even in 2017 had the money and engineering
| resources to update or replace their flagship computer -
| whether with a small update to Skylake & Polaris and/or a
| return to a cheesegrater design as they did in 2019.
|
| But they chose not to. They let their flagship computer
| rot for over 2000 days.
| jasomill wrote:
| Aside from the GPU mess, the 2013 was a nice machine,
| basically a proto-Mac Studio. Aside from software, the only
| thing that pushed me off my D300/64GB/12-core as an everyday
| desktop + front-end machine is the fact that there's no
| economically sensible way to get 4K video at 120 Hz given
| that an eGPU enclosure + a decent AMD GPU would cost as much
| as a Mac mini, so I'm slumming it in Windows for a few months
| until the smoke clears from the next Mac Studio announcement.
|
| At which point I'll decide whether to replace my Mac Pro with
| a Mac Studio or a Linux workstation; honestly, I'm about
| 60/40 leaning towards Linux at this point, in which case I'd
| also buy a lower-end Mac, probably a MacBook Air.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| I'm in the Linux desktop / Mac laptop camp, and it works
| well for me. Prevents me getting too tied up in any one
| ecosystem so that I can jump ship if Apple start releasing
| duds again.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Honestly the Mac Studio is the new Mac Pro, this makes more sense
| to me.
| therealmarv wrote:
| but even that one looks kinda outdated when looking at latest
| M5 Max laptops.
| jshier wrote:
| Mac Studio waits for the Ultra chips to ship, which are
| always last in a generation. Perhaps the M5's chiplet
| architecture will help them move faster there.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| The Ultra variants of the M series chips had previously consisted
| of two of the Max chips bonded together.
|
| The M5 generation Pro and Max chips have moved to a chiplet based
| architecture, with all the CPU cores on one chiplet, and all the
| GPU cores on another.
|
| https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M5
|
| So what will the M5 Ultra look like?
|
| If you integrate two CPU chiplets and two GPU chiplets, you're
| looking at 36 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, and 1228 GB/s of memory
| bandwidth.
| muro wrote:
| Or it could be the same CPU as in pro/max with more GPU
| chiplets.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Sure.
|
| AI workloads would really benefit from having more RAM, GPU
| cores, and memory channels.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Something tells me this mentality is how Apple ended up
| with thousands of idling Private Cloud Compute servers.
|
| But sure, more GPU cores will _definitely_ fix it this
| time.
| system2 wrote:
| If I remember correctly, the maximum configuration was something
| like $35k back in the day. I wonder what those people feel like
| now. On the other hand, if they have $35k to burn, probably they
| don't even think about it.
| giantrobot wrote:
| If you spend $35k and just idle the machine or just check
| e-mail you've burnt the money. If it's your work machine and
| you've got a $100/hr billable rate it's paid for in a little
| over a month. Three months at a $50/hr rate.
|
| If you bought the $35k Mac Pro in 2023 when it was released and
| have a $50/hr rate it's been paid off for about 30 months. So
| as of today those owners probably aren't too broken hearted.
| They'll likely get at least another three years out of them.
|
| People buying $35k Mac Pros probably paid them off after a
| single contract. So they've just been _making_ money rather
| than _costing_ money.
| klausa wrote:
| >If it's your work machine and you've got a $100/hr billable
| rate it's paid for in a little over a month.
|
| Are you working 996 weeks or something?
|
| At standard 40h work-week the math works out to 8.75 weeks to
| "pay for itself".
| bluedino wrote:
| What if that machine lets you do your job 4x faster?
| klausa wrote:
| I don't think working faster 4x makes you experience time
| dilation to the degree that you experience 8.75 weeks as
| 4 in your frame of reference; but my relativity math is a
| bit rusty, I could be wrong.
| gjm11 wrote:
| I think these calculations are a bit bogus.
|
| If you spend $35k on a nice computer, and then earn $35k from
| doing some work using it, that doesn't mean that buying the
| computer has paid for itself unless the computer is _solely
| responsible_ for that income. It probably isn 't.
|
| It's not necessarily even true that after doing that work
| it's "paid for", in the sense that getting the $35k income
| means that you were able to afford the $35k computer: that
| only follows if you didn't need any of that income for other
| luxuries, such as food and shelter.
|
| If you're earning $50/hour, 40hr/week then what you've done
| after 17.5 weeks is _earned enough to buy_ that $35k
| computer. Assuming you don 't need any of that money for
| anything else, like food and shelter.
|
| If the fancy computer helps you get that income then of
| course it's perfectly legit to estimate how much difference
| it makes and decide it pays for itself, but it's not as
| simple as comparing the price of the computer with your total
| income.
|
| Regardless of how much it contributes, if you have plenty of
| money then it's also perfectly legit to say "I can
| comfortably afford this and I want it so I'll but it" but,
| again, it's not as simple as comparing the price of the
| computer with your total income.
| ks2048 wrote:
| With the popularity of mac mini (and macbooks for that matter)
| for doing ML/AI work, I would have thought Apple could make a Mac
| Pro that could make for a good workstation for doing in-house
| ML/AI stuff.
|
| I bought a GPU maybe a decade ago for this, and it's not worth
| the hassle (for me at least), but a nice out-of-the box solution,
| I would pay for.
| bombcar wrote:
| The problem is that the M1 chips foretold the doom of the Mac
| Pro unless they could figure out some way to do _something_
| that you couldn 't do with a Mac Studio - thunderbolt is so
| good that it's hard to justify anything else.
|
| If they had done more with NUMA in the M series maybe you could
| have a Mac Pro with M5 Ultras that can take a number of M5
| "daughter cards" that do something useful.
| readitalready wrote:
| Apple really dropped the ball here. They had every ability to
| make something competitive with Nvidia for AI training as well as
| inference, by selling high end multi GPU Mac Pro workstations as
| well as servers, but for some reason chose not to. They had the
| infrastructure and custom SoCs and everything. What a waste.
|
| It really could have been a bigger market for them than even the
| iPhone.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Just about everybody who isn't Nvidia dropped the ball,
| bigtime.
|
| Intel should have shipped their GPUs with much more VRAM from
| day one. If they had done this, they'd have carved out a
| massive niche and much more market share, and it would have
| been trivially simple to do.
|
| AMD should have improved their tools and software, etc.
|
| Apple should have done as you say.
|
| Google had nigh on a decade to boost TPU production, and
| they're still somehow behind the curve.
|
| Such a lack of vision. And thus Nvidia is, now quite durably,
| the most valuable company in the world. Imagine telling that to
| a time traveler from 2018.
| readitalready wrote:
| I think for AMD, they were focused on competing against
| Intel. Remember AMD was almost bankrupt about 15 years ago
| because of competing against Intel. But the very first GPU
| use for AI was actually with an ATI/AMD GPU, not an Nvidia
| one. Everyone thinks Nvidia kicked off the GPU AI craze when
| Ilya Sutskever cleaned up on AlexNet with an Nvidia GPU back
| in 2012, or when Andrew Ng and team at Stanford published
| their "Large Scale Deep Unsupervised Learning using Graphics
| Processors" in 2009, but in 2004, a couple of Korean
| researchers were the first to implement neural networks on a
| GPU, using ATI Radeons: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science
| /article/abs/pii/S00313...
|
| And as of now I do believe AMD is in the second strongest
| position in the datacenter space after Nvidia, ahead of even
| Google.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > And thus Nvidia is, now quite durably, the most valuable
| company in the world.
|
| Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world right up
| until the AI bubble pops. Which, while it's hard to nail down
| when, _is_ going to happen. I wouldn 't call their position
| durable at all.
| HerbManic wrote:
| It is definitely a case that they will fall a long way but
| Nvidia will not fail as a whole. They have a way of
| maximizing their position relentlessly. CUDA turns out to
| endlessly put them in amazing positions on things like
| image recognition, AR, Crypto and now AI.
|
| For all the faults of them leaning in hard on these things
| for stock market and personal gains, Nvidia still has some
| of the best quality products around. That is their saving
| grace.
|
| They will not be the world most valuable company once the
| bubble pops, will probably never get back there again, but
| they will continue to be a decent enough business. I just
| want them going back to talking about graphics more than AI
| again, that will be nice.
| gizajob wrote:
| The crashing and burning of Nvidia stock has been predicted
| for a while now and keeps not really happening. It's gone
| pretty flat and volatile up there around $180 but they keep
| delivering the results to back it up. I was thinking this
| week that Apple is really primed to make a killing from
| people who want to run their LLM on-device coupled with an
| agent in the next couple of years. We're a long way off
| being able to train the models - this is going to need an
| Nvidia-powered datacentre for the foreseeable future, but
| the local inference seems absolutely like a market that
| Apple could capture, gutting all the most premium revenue
| from Anthropic and OpenAI by selling Macs with a large
| amount of integrated memory to anyone who wants to give
| them the money to run their native OpenClaw/agent instead
| of paying ever-growing monthly bills for tokens.
| user34283 wrote:
| I might as well say that no, it is not going to happen.
|
| As handwriting code is rapidly going out of fashion this
| year, it seems likely AI is coming for most of knowledge
| work next.
|
| And who is to say that manual labor is safe for long?
| gehsty wrote:
| Why should Apple have done this? It doesn't fit their
| business in anyway shape or form. Where does data centre
| hardware sit relative to electronics / humanities cross roads
| that is foundational for Apple?
| AdamN wrote:
| Yeah nothing about Apple is server side and imho that's
| what training is. To be serious about it as a company you
| have all sorts of other tools (crawlers, etc...) helping
| with training so it basically has to be in the datacenter
| at any reasonable scale anyway. And that's just not where
| Apple lives. We saw with Swift that they couldn't focus on
| server side enough to make it a serious language there and
| they've consistently declined to enter that area over the
| years because it's outside their wheelhouse.
| DCKing wrote:
| > Why should Apple have done this?
|
| For money, probably.
|
| Apple is presumably leaving a lot of money on the table by
| not trying to sell Apple Silicon for AI inference and
| training. They're the only ones who can attach reasonably
| large GPUs (M3 Ultra) to very large amounts of cheaper
| memory (512GB SO-DIMM per GPU). Apple could e.g. sell
| server SKUs of Mac Studios, heck they can sell M3 Ultra
| chips on PCIe cards. And they could further develop Apple
| Silicon in that direction. Presumably they would be seen as
| a very legit competitor to Nvidia that way, perhaps moreso
| than Intel and AMD. I'd assume that in the current climate
| this would be extremely lucrative.
|
| Now, _actually_ doing this would disrupt Apple 's own
| supply chain as well as force it to spend significant
| internal resources and cultural change for this kind of
| product line. There's a good argument to be made it would
| disproportionally negatively affect its Mac business, so
| this would be a very risky move.
|
| But given that AI hardware is likely much higher margin
| than the Mac business an argument could probably (sadly) be
| made that it'd be lucrative for them to try it. I
| personally don't think Apple is inclined to take this kind
| of risk to jeopardize the Mac, but I'm sure some people at
| Apple have considered this.
| gehsty wrote:
| I guess I mean for apple to remain as apple, they would
| not do this due to company culture.
| 1W6MIC49CYX9GAP wrote:
| Intel doesn't limit how much memory card makers can pair with
| their GPU. It's up to the card maker.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Trust me: If Intel could, it would.
|
| From inside news: They were not breaking even on their
| existing GPUs. The strategy was to take a loss just to have a
| presence in the space.
| dabockster wrote:
| Intel could position their cards as strong for certain
| workloads. They had AV1 support first in market, for
| example.
| etchalon wrote:
| Nothing is a bigger market than the iPhone, let alone expensive
| niche machines.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > something competitive with Nvidia for AI training
|
| Apple is counting on something else: model shrink. Every one is
| now looking at "how do we make these smaller".
|
| At some point a beefy Mac Studio and the "right sized" model is
| going to be what people want. Apple dumped a 4 pack of them in
| the hands of a lot of tech influencers a few months back and
| they were fairly interesting (expensive tho).
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Cheaper than what you'd expect though. You could get a nice
| setup for $20-40k 6mo ago. As far as enterprise investments
| go, that's a rounding error.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Drop that down to 5k, and make it useful.
|
| Give every iPhone family a in house Siri that will deal
| with canceling services and pursuing refunds.
|
| Your customer screw up results in your site getting an
| agent drive DDOS on its CS department till you give in.
|
| Siri: "Hey User, here's your daily update, I see you
| haven't been to the gym, would you like me to harass their
| customer service department till they let you out of their
| onerous contract?"
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I'm running modest setup using a mistral model (24B) on a
| 9070 (AMD) and 32gb of ram. $1800 machine at the time I
| built it. It ultimately boils down to what you want to do
| with it. For me, it's basically a drafting tool. I use it
| to break through writer's block, iterate, or just throw
| out some ideas. Sometimes summarize but that can be hit
| or misss.
|
| I don't need the latest and greatest and I fine tuned LM
| studio enough that I get acceptable results in 30 to 90
| seconds that help me keep moving ahead. I am not a
| software engineer, I am definitely not as much of a
| "coder" as the average person on HN. So if I can do it
| for less than $2000, I bet a lot of (smarter/experience
| coding) people could see great results for $5000.
|
| You can get an M3 ultra Mac studio with 96gb ram for
| $4000. If you're willing to go up to $6k it's 256gb.
| Wayyyyy more firepower than my setup. I imagine plenty
| powerful for a lot of people.
| a1o wrote:
| Not all enterprises are the same, I imagine many companies
| have different departments working with local optimums, so
| someone who could benefit from it to get more productivity
| might not have access to it because the department that is
| doing hardware acquisition is being measured in isolation.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I think it's a little unnecessary to lecture somebody on
| HN about how enterprises come in different shapes and
| sizes. It's pretty clear what I'm implying here if you
| aren't actively trying to assume the most reduced, least
| charitable version of my statement.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Apple is counting on something else: model shrink_
|
| The most powerful AI interactions I've had involved giving a
| model a task and then fucking off. At that point, I don't
| actually care if it takes 5 minutes or an hour. I've cued up
| a list of background tasks it can work on, and that I can
| circle back to when I have time. In that context, smaller
| isn't even the virtue at hand-user patience is. Having a
| machine that works on my bullshit questions and modelling
| projects at one tenth the speed of a datacentre could still
| work out to being a good deal even before considering the
| privacy and lock-in problems.
| raincole wrote:
| Cool? And it has nothing to do with what kind of consumer
| hardware Apple should sell. If your use cases are literally
| "bigger model better" then the you should always use cloud.
| No matter how much computing power Apple squeezes into
| their device it won't be a mighty data center.
| gizajob wrote:
| For running the model once it's been trained, all a
| datacenter does is give you lower latency. Once the
| devices have a large enough memory to host the model
| locally, then the need to pay datacenter bills is going
| to be questioned. I'd rather run OpenClaw on my device
| plugged into a local LLM rather than rely on OpenAI or
| Claude.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| What "tooling" do you use to let AIs work unattended for
| long periods?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What "tooling" do you use to let AIs work unattended
| for long periods?_
|
| Claude and Kagi Assistant. I tried tooling up a multi-
| model environment in Ollama and it was annoying. It's
| just searching the web, building models and then running
| a test suite against the model to refine it.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _At some point a beefy Mac Studio and the "right sized"
| model is going to be what people want._
|
| It's pretty clear that this isn't going to happen any time
| soon, if ever. You can't shrink the models without destroying
| their coherence, and this is a consistently robust
| observation across the board.
| sipjca wrote:
| I don't think it's about literally shrinking the models via
| quantization, but rather training smaller/more efficient
| models from scratch
|
| Smaller models have gotten much more powerful the last 2
| years. Qwen 3.5 is one example of this. The cost/compute
| requirements of running the same level intelligence is
| going down
| kyboren wrote:
| Yes, but bigger models are still more capable. Models
| shrinking (iso-performance) just means that people will
| train and use more capable models with a longer context.
| sipjca wrote:
| Of course they are! Both are important and will be around
| and used for different reasons
| HerbManic wrote:
| I have said for a while that we need a sort of big-
| little-big model situation.
|
| The inputs are parsed with a large LLM. This gets passed
| on to a smaller hyper specific model. That outputs to a
| large LLM to make it readable.
|
| Essentially you can blend two model type. Probabilistic
| Input > Deterministic function > Probabilistic Output.
| Have multiple little determainistic models that are
| choose for specific tasks. Now all of this is VERY easy
| to say, and VERY difficult to do.
|
| But if it could be done, it would basically shrink all
| the models needed. Don't need a huge input/output model
| if it is more of an interpreter.
| root_axis wrote:
| There are no practically useful small models, including
| Qwen 3.5. Yes, the small models of today are a lot more
| interesting than the small models of 2 years ago, but
| they remain broadly incoherent beyond demos and
| tinkering.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Don't mistake stock market performance for revenue. NVIDIA
| makes ~200B annually, same as what Apple makes from iPhones.
| It's a big market but GPUs aren't just AI.
| readitalready wrote:
| I'm purely talking in terms of revenue. There's a huge demand
| for AI systems from personal workstations to datacenter
| servers, and Apple was one of the few companies in the world
| in a position to build complete systems for it.
|
| But for some reason Apple thought the sound recording
| engineer or the video editor market was more important...
| like, WTF dude? Have some vision at least!
| aurareturn wrote:
| Some people at Apple see it. That's why they added matmul
| to M5 GPU and keep mentioning LMStudio in their marketing.
| rudedogg wrote:
| Their rule of only releasing major software updates once
| a year in June is holding them back IMO. Their local LLM
| apis were dated before macOS/iOS 26 was even released.
| Just because something worked 20 years ago doesn't mean
| it works today, but I'm sure it's hard to argue against a
| historically successful strategy internally.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Huh? What local LLM apis? It uses Metal.
| rudedogg wrote:
| The application development APIs, ie: https://developer.a
| pple.com/documentation/technologyoverview...
| vlovich123 wrote:
| It is more important. Both for the customer base that
| actually buys Apple machines as well as the cache and
| mindshare of being used by the people that create American
| culture.
|
| Even if Apple had an amazing GPU for AI it wouldn't matter
| hugely - local inference hasn't taken off yet and cloud
| inference and training all uses servers where Apple has no
| market share and wasn't going to get it since people had
| already built all the stacks around CUDA before Apple could
| even have awoken to that.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Apple already seems to do pretty well when it comes to AI
| systems on personal computers. Datacenters simply isn't
| their business, it would need some major changes on their
| part. Also, AI is a bubble, it will burst eventually, and
| because Apple doesn't have the fist mover advantage Nvidia
| has, they have a lot to lose entering this market now.
|
| Sound recording engineers and video editors will not
| disappear after the AI bubble bursts, and Apple is wise to
| keep that market. Bursting the AI bubble will not make AI
| disappear, it will just end the crazy cashflows we are
| seeing now. And in that regard, with the capabilities of
| their hardware, Apple is in a pretty good spot I think.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Apple abandoned the pro video editor market many years ago
| with the trashcan mac pro - theyre "prosumer" only at best.
| aurareturn wrote:
| $280b and growing 70% YoY.
|
| $1t backlog in orders in next 2 years.
| HerbManic wrote:
| Those back log orders are wild! One does wonder that if the
| bubble collapses or more global upsets happen in that time,
| how many of those will ever be fulfilled? Reality might be
| not so impressive, but considering if it fell even 80%,
| that is still $200 B in revenue and that is huge.
|
| Remember when a $1 billion valuation used to be a big
| thing? That is nothing compared with nowadays.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Just look at the price of H100 cloud rental prices.
| Demand is increasing.
| root_axis wrote:
| Nah, Apple made the right choice. Nobody except a niche market
| of hobbyists is interested in running tiny quantized models.
| gizajob wrote:
| About the same niche market as the people who bought the
| Apple I, and we know where that went.
| wtallis wrote:
| The Apple I was a pretty poor predictor of what mainstream
| mass-market computing was going to end up looking like. I
| don't think anybody has yet come up with the Apple II of
| local LLMs, let alone the VisiCalc or Windows 95.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| > They had the infrastructure and custom SoCs and everything.
| What a waste.
|
| What are they wasting, exactly?
| kristopolous wrote:
| this is what needs to come back with modern hardware and modern
| interconnect
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve
| zer0zzz wrote:
| How is this dropping the ball? I think they dropped the ball a
| long time ago by waiting until M5 to do integrated tensor cores
| instead of the separate ANE only which was present before.
|
| For multi-gpu you can network multiple Macs at high speed now.
| Their biggest disadvantage to Nvidia right now is that no one
| wants to do kernel authoring in Metal. AMD learned that the
| hard way when they gave up on OpenCL and built HIP.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| If Apple doesn't offer a Linux product, they cannot be used
| seriously in headless computing task. They are adamant in
| controlling the whole stack, so unless they remake some server
| version of macOS (and wait years for the community to accustom
| themselves with it), they will keep being a
| consumer/professional oriented company
| greggsy wrote:
| They didn't drop the ball at all?
|
| They want to be able to sell handsets, desktops and laptops to
| their customer base.
|
| Pursing a product line that would consume the finite amount of
| silicon manufacturing resources away from that user base would
| be corporate suicide.
|
| Even nvidia has all but dropped support for its traditional
| gaming customer base to satisfy its new strategy.
|
| At any rate, the local inference capabilities are only going to
| get cheaper and more accessible over the coming years, and
| Apple are probably better placed than anyone to make it happen.
| gehsty wrote:
| If my Grandma had wheels she would be a bicycle. Apple would
| need to transition from being a consumer electronics company to
| being a B2B retailer for data centre hardware to take advantage
| of this.
|
| Obviously Siri from WWDC 2yrs ago was a disaster for Apple.
| Other than that they seem to have done pretty well navigating
| the new LLM world. I do think they would benefit from having
| their own SOA LLM, but I don't think its is necessary for them.
| My mental model for LLMs and Apple is that they are similar
| Garage Band - "Now everyone can play an instrument" becomes
| "now anyone can make an app". Apple owns the interface to the
| user (i don't see anyone making nicer to use consumer hardware)
| and can use what ever stack in the background to deliver the
| technical features they decide to.
| EagnaIonat wrote:
| > AI training as well as inference
|
| Inference has never been an issue for M series, and MLX just
| ramped it up further.
|
| You can do training on the latest MBPs, although any serious
| models you are going to the cloud anyway.
| huslage wrote:
| Apple makes AI inference and training servers by the thousands.
| They just don't sell them to anyone. They use them internally
| in their datacenters. They didn't drop the ball, they are
| playing a different game while not cannibalizing their existing
| customer base.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Apple didn't drop the ball - they have no interest in creating
| servers for a limited time bubble. It is laughable that anyone
| would think that market would be bigger than iPhone - there's a
| reason no RAM manufacturer is building new plants to take
| advantage of the current demand - they don't expect it to last
| long enough to pay for their investment.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Reading comments, I don't think people are being completely fair
| here. For Intel and AMD to approach what Apple has accomplished
| they're making many of the same compromises with Panther Lake and
| Ryzen AI Max. Apple chose to put disk controllers on their SoP
| rather than having them on the storage module. This shaves a tiny
| bit of latency. Worth it? No idea. I'm shit at hardware design.
|
| As for not having a Pro or otherwise expandable system? It's
| shit. They make several variations of their chips, and I don't
| think it would hurt them to make an SoP for a socket, put a giant
| cooling system in it, and give it 10 or 12 PCIe slots. As for
| what would go in those slots? Make this beast rack mountable and
| people would toss better network cards, sound/video output or
| capture, storage controllers, and all kinds of other things in
| there. A key here would be to not charge so much just because
| they can. Make the price reasonable.
| bombcar wrote:
| They have tried variations of this since time immemorial (we
| can argue about "price reasonable") but there's just not much
| you can _do_ with it that you can 't do much cheaper or simpler
| in other ways.
|
| The Xserve has been dead for 15 years now, and it was never
| tremendously amazing (though it was nice kit).
|
| Apple apparently has some sort of "in-house" xserve-like thing
| they don't sell; but turning that into a product would likely
| be more useful than a Mac Pro, unless they add NUMA or some
| other way of allowing an M5 to access racks and racks of DIMMs.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| WSJ recently did a thing about it but details were rather
| light
| karim79 wrote:
| I have three of the trash can ones. They are absolute pieces of
| art, as useless as they are computationally these days (energy-
| to-performance wise at least). I will never sell nor give them
| away.
| adolph wrote:
| In other news, the Mac Pro Wheels Kit was also discontinued.
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/26/mac-pro-wheels-kit-disc...
| lukeh wrote:
| Still rocking a 2019 (Intel) Mac Pro here, all slots filled with
| various Pro Tools and UAD DSP cards, SSD, GPU, etc. I'm planning
| to get as much mileage out of it as I can. I'm sure a Studio
| would be more performant, but the Thunderbolt to PCIe chassis are
| not cheap.
| alifeinbinary wrote:
| i'm in the same boat. I bought mine back in 2021 and honestly I
| don't regret my decision. It's my main software development of
| music production computer plus every Sunday night I get to play
| counterstrike with the boys by dual booting into Windows. I'm
| able to service repair and upgrade it myself and one day when
| I'm ready to move on I'll use it as my home server. The crazy
| thing is that my next upgrade will be going back to a MacBook
| Pro most likely because the thunderbolt connectivity will be
| able to handle the Blackmagic 4 camera broadcast capture card
| and NVME PCIe storage card that are in my Mac Pro right now
| through some external enclosure.
|
| The only real drawback that I've experienced with the Mac Pro
| has been the lack of support for large language models on the
| AMD GPU due to Apple's lacklustre metal drivers but I've been
| working with a couple of other developers to port a MoltenVK
| translation layer to Ollama that enables LLM's on the GPU.
| We're trying to get it on the main branch since testing has
| gone well.
|
| One thing a lot of commenters in this thread are overlooking is
| that this is the death nell for repairable and upgradable
| computing for Mac, which is super disappointing.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Studios are repairable. Upgrading is being deprecated
| however, and I'm not sure that's bad for Apple. It may not be
| bad for the end user either - it feels like external TB/USB
| peripherals might have a longer life transferred between
| computers than an internal PCIe version - and a larger market
| as they will work with any Mac.
| bredren wrote:
| I'm much less concerned about the Mac Pro and more concerned we
| won't see an XDR Ultra Display to replace the 32".
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| They did come out with a new XDR. It's just not 32".
| jasoneckert wrote:
| As someone who came from the SGI O2/Octane era when high-end
| workstations were compact, distinctive, and sexy, I've never
| really understood the allure of the Mac Pro, with the exception
| of the 2013 Mac Pro tube, which I owned (small footprint, quiet,
| and powerful).
|
| For me, aesthetics and size are important. That workstation on
| your desk should justify its presence, not just exist as some
| hulking box.
|
| When Apple released the Mac Studio, it made perfect sense from a
| form-factor point-of-view. The internal expansion slots in the M2
| Mac Pro didn't make any sense. It was like a bag of potato chips
| - mostly air. And far too big and ugly to be part of my work
| area! I'm surprised that Apple didn't discontinue it sooner.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| As someone who worked on the M2 Mac Pro and has a real soft
| spot for it, I get it. It's horrendously expensive and doesn't
| offer much benefit over a Mac Studio and a thunderbolt pci
| chassis. My personal dream is that vms would support pci pass
| through and so you can just spin up a Linux vm and let it drive
| the gpus. But at that point, why are you buying a Mac?
|
| Opinions are my own obvs.
| markn951 wrote:
| > Opinions are my own obvs.
|
| Whose else would they be?
| mandeepj wrote:
| Maybe he was trying to say he isn't a spokesman for anyone
| else :-)
| TheDong wrote:
| > as someone who worked on the m2 mac pro
|
| They're trying to make it very clear they're not speaking
| on behalf of Apple Inc, despite having worked (or working)
| there.
|
| Big companies like to give employees some minimal "media
| training", which mostly amounts to "do not speak for the
| company, do not say anything that might even slightly sound
| like you're speaking for the company".
| dotancohen wrote:
| > > Opinions are my own obvs. > Whose else would
| they be?
|
| On the internet? Often the opinions of others they see
| getting upvotes.
| OJFord wrote:
| An employer's, especially as they stated having worked (and
| perhaps still) at Apple in the same comment.
| code_duck wrote:
| Oh, I interpreted it as "did work using a Mac Pro" vs
| helped develop the Mac Pro itself.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| >> Opinions are my own obvs.
|
| > Whose else would they be?
|
| _takes a look at the user profile_
|
| Oh, they are a journalist/writer for a big name outfit
| zeusk wrote:
| > My personal dream is that vms would support pci pass
| through and so you can just spin up a Linux vm and let it
| drive the gpus.
|
| SR-IOV is just that? and is well supported by both Windows
| and Linux.
| AbanoubRodolf wrote:
| SR-IOV and VFIO passthrough are different things. SR-IOV
| partitions a PCIe device across multiple VMs simultaneously
| (common for NICs and NVMe). VFIO passthrough gives one VM
| exclusive ownership of a physical device. For GPU compute
| you almost always want full passthrough, not SR-IOV
| partitioning.
|
| The harder problem on Apple Silicon is that the M2 Ultra's
| GPU is integrated into the SoC -- it's not a discrete PCIe
| device you can isolate with an IOMMU group. Apple's
| Virtualization framework doesn't expose VFIO-equivalent
| hooks, so even if you add a discrete AMD Radeon to the Mac
| Pro's PCIe slots, there's no supported path to pass it
| through to a Linux guest right now.
|
| On Intel Macs this actually worked via VFIO with the right
| IOMMU config. Apple Silicon VMs can do metal translation
| layers but that's not the same as bare-metal GPU access.
| It's a real limitation and I doubt Apple will prioritize
| solving it since it would undercut the "just use macOS"
| pitch.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Under a comment regarding the O2/Octane (both of which I own
| :) era, I first read "vms" as VMS, not multiple instances of
| a VM...
| asimovDev wrote:
| do / did you have to always work in the office or do you get
| to work from home by taking a test rig with you ? always been
| curious about this
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _aesthetics and size are important_
|
| It's dumb from a practical perspective. But I keep hoping
| they'll vertically compress their trashcan design so it looks
| like their Cupertino headquarters.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The very definition of a halo product.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I'm surprised they even tried selling an Apple Silicon Mac Pro
| - I expected that product to die the moment they announced the
| transition. Everything that makes Apple Silicon great also
| makes it garbage for high-performance workstations.
|
| The allure of the Mac Pro is that you could dodge the Apple Tax
| by loading it up with RAM and compute accelerators Apple
| couldn't mark up. Well, Apple Silicon works against all of
| that. The hardware fabric and PCIe controller specifically
| prohibit mapping PCIe device memory as memory[0], which means
| no GPU driver ever will work with it. Not even in Asahi Linux.
| And the RAM is soldered in _for performance_. An Ultra class
| chip has like 16 memory channels, which even in a 1-DIMM per
| channel routing would have trace lengths long enough to
| bottleneck operating frequency.
|
| The only thing the socketed RAM Mac Pros could legitimately do
| that _wasn 't_ a way to circumvent Apple's pricing structure
| was take terabytes of memory - something that requires special
| memory types that Apple's memory controller IP likely does not
| support. Intel put in the engineering for it in Xeon and Apple
| got it for free before jumping ship.
|
| Even then, all of this has gone completely backwards. Commodity
| DRAM is insanely expensive now and Apple's royalty-bearing RAM
| prices are actually reasonable in comparison. So there's no
| benefit to modularity anymore. Actually, it's a detriment,
| because price-discovery-enforcing scalpers can rip RAM out of
| perfectly working computers and resell the RAM. It's way harder
| to scalp RAM that's soldered on the board.
|
| [0] In violation of ARM spec, even!
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > An Ultra class chip has like 16 memory channels, which even
| in a 1-DIMM per channel routing would have trace lengths long
| enough to bottleneck operating frequency.
|
| CAMM fixes this, right?
|
| > Actually, it's a detriment, because price-discovery-
| enforcing scalpers can rip RAM out of perfectly working
| computers and resell the RAM. It's way harder to scalp RAM
| that's soldered on the board.
|
| Scalping isn't a thing unless you were selling below the
| market price to begin with which, even with the higher
| prices, Apple isn't doing and would have no real reason to
| do.
|
| Notice that in real life it only really happens with concert
| tickets and that's because of scam sandwich that is
| Ticketmaster.
| chongli wrote:
| Ticketmaster is a reputation management company. Their true
| purpose is to take the reputation hit for charging market
| value for limited availability event tickets. Artists do
| not want to take this reputation hit themselves because it
| impacts their brand too much.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Which is why it's quite appropriate for their reputation
| to be absolute shit and for members of the public to make
| sure the stink spreads to anyone who chooses to do
| business with them as a disincentive to doing it.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| i wish i'd never traded in my 2016 mac pro (aluminum polished
| tube) as it was beefy, it was silent, clever thermo design
| (like the powerpc cube 20 years earlier or so), and i'd
| upgraded the living crap out of it for cheap.
| moogly wrote:
| > That workstation on your desk should
|
| _Under_ your desk, right? _Right?!_
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I mean... if you spent $7,000 on it, do you really want to
| hide it away under the desk?
| yoz-y wrote:
| Yes, because you're buying a tool, not a conversation
| piece.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Por que no los dos? -\\(tsu)/-
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| That's why my Lian Li anniversary edition is next to my
| desk. Also because it is nearly as tall and wouldn't fit
| under it.
| kgwgk wrote:
| It's a desktop computer, not a deskbottom computer.
| fouc wrote:
| It'd get mighty dusty under there after awhile, best to keep
| it where you can see it so it doesn't get into trouble.
| petepete wrote:
| I have a sit/stand desk so mine's on top, it makes organising
| the cables much easier.
|
| Nothing as swish looking as a Mac Pro though, it's a plain
| black Lian Li behemoth from the late 00s.
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| I also have a standing desk, and my desktop computer is
| still on the floor. That way I can just route all the
| cables to the back and then under the desk to my PC. Looks
| very clean as well.
| mrkstu wrote:
| Yep, with wireless keyboards and mice you really only
| need your monitor cables on the desk in this setup.
| moogly wrote:
| Yep, same.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| If it is really a behemoth, how does you stand desk hold it
| up?
|
| I have a Lian Li anniversary edition snail case and I don't
| think any moveable desk could hold it.
| linguae wrote:
| As much as I love alluring designs such as the NeXT Cube (which
| I have), the Power Mac G4 Cube (which I wish I had), and the
| 2013 Mac Pro (which I also have), sometimes a person needs a
| big, hulking box of computational power with room for internal
| expansion, and from the first Quadra tower in the early 1990s
| until the 2012 Mac Pro was discontinued, and again from 2019
| until today, Apple delivered this.
|
| Even so, the ARM Mac Pro felt more like a halo car rather than
| a workhorse. The ARM Mac Pro may have been more compelling had
| it supported GPUs. Without this support, the price premium of
| the Mac Pro over the Mac Studio was too great to justify
| purchasing the Pro for many people, unless they absolutely
| needed internal expansion.
|
| I'd love a user-upgradable Mac like my 2013 Mac Pro, but it's
| clear that Apple has long moved on with its ARM Macs. I've
| moved on to the PC ecosystem. On one hand ARM Macs are quite
| powerful and energy-efficient, but on the other hand they're
| very expensive for non-base RAM and storage configurations,
| though with today's crazy prices for DDR5 RAM and NVMe SSDs,
| Apple's prices for upgrades don't look that bad by comparison.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _sometimes a person needs a big, hulking box of
| computational power with room for internal expansion_
|
| Between cloud computing and server racks, is this still a
| real niche?
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| Yes: A prominent examples is for those that don't know how
| make servers and do a lot of video editing that want high
| disk speeds and processing power.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| >That workstation on your desk should justify its presence
|
| It does the work you want it to do is not enough to justify its
| presence ?
| mixdup wrote:
| Parent comment OP has to be trolling
| SwtCyber wrote:
| But I think the Mac Pro was never really trying to be on your
| desk in the first place. For a lot of its target users, it
| lived under the desk or in a rack, and the size wasn't about
| aesthetics so much as airflow, expansion, and serviceability
| jayd16 wrote:
| I hope this is satire.
| ruptwelve wrote:
| I mean for the cost of the Mac Pro wheels you can get a Macbook
| Neo these days!
| yalogin wrote:
| Another company would have killed it a long time ago. It lasted
| this long because it's Apple.
| musicale wrote:
| I feel like Apple is going back to the days of toaster
| "appliance" Macs. No slots, no upgrades, just buy a new one in
| 3-7 years.
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| I hate how I can't buy an new apple silicon with upgradeable
| RAM or SSD. Is there a legit reason why they couldn't make
| these things upgradeable at all even on a studio machine? 4TB
| is the smallest SSD I ever want in a new machine, but buying
| one from Apple is stupidly expensive. Back in the intel days,
| I'd buy a macbook pro, for example, with less ram and a smaller
| SSD than the max available and then upgrade to much cheaper
| aftermarket parts a few years later when prices dropped.
|
| I'm still not going to use windows or linux. Don't want to be
| an IT guy on the side just to keep linux machines working. This
| may not be obvious to some unless you try to use printers and
| scanners that are more than 5 years old and what them to be on
| the network. And, you don't install virtualization tools like
| vmware that require compiling and loading kernel drivers which
| ends up being incompatible with new OS releases...etc.
|
| Windows is just too much of a painful acceptance of mediocrity
| and apathy in product design for me.
| aloha2436 wrote:
| > Is there a legit reason why they couldn't make these things
| upgradeable at all even on a studio machine?
|
| For the SSD, no. For the memory, yes. The memory lives on the
| same chip as the CPU and the GPU, it's even more tightly
| bound than just being soldered on. The memory being there has
| legitimate technical benefits that make it much
| easier/cheaper for them to reach the extremely high memory
| bandwidths that they do.
| lloeki wrote:
| This, although it's not merely "easier/cheaper", it's
| "impossible" (unless you sacrifice a ton of performance)
|
| Same reason as a) GDDR on dGPUs (I think I read somewhere
| that GDDR is very much like regular DDR, just with much
| tighter paths and thus soldered in) and b) Framework
| Desktop (performance would reportedly halve if RAM were not
| soldered)
|
| SSD reasons I seem to recall are architectural for
| security: some parts (controller?) that usually sit on a
| NVMe SSD are embedded in the SoC next to (or inside?) the
| secure enclave processor or whatever the equivalent of the
| T2 thing is in Mx chips, so what you'd swap would be a bank
| of raw storage chips which don't match the controller.
| razakel wrote:
| Apparently upgrading the SSD can be done, but it's a
| weird form factor and you need another Mac to restore it.
| StingyJelly wrote:
| >it's even more tightly bound than just being soldered on
|
| No. There is a reason for it but no, it's just soldered on
| the same carrier board as the APU, in order to be really
| close to it. Apple could have used a form factor like CAMM2
| and it would have worked the same, be it at slightly higher
| cost. The reason is simply to kill upgrade options and cut
| manufacturing costs - same as for any other soldered ram.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| I think it's possible that Apple will support LPCAMM2
| assuming it can done without risking the SOC but it is
| too cutting edge single vendor technology for them to be
| implementing it now.
| eigenspace wrote:
| The memory does *not* live on the same chip as the CPU and
| GPU, you appear to be thinking of HBM. Apple is using
| regular LPDDR5 RAM on separate chips, but soldered near to
| the CPU/GPU.
|
| The soldering does serve a purpose though, the shorter
| traces allow for better signal integrity at higher speeds.
| This isn't something special about what Apple is doing
| though, Intel and AMD are doing the exact same thing with
| the exact same LPDDR5 chips on their respective APUs.
|
| HBM is still almost purely reserved for datacentre GPUs.
| _ph_ wrote:
| The SSDs in the Studio are on modules, you can exchange
| those. They are in a custom format though.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Are they really SSDs and not just flash boards with the
| controller part of the Apple Silicon?
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| Even the toaster appliance Mac's had upgradeable ram and hard
| drives though. But it does seem like that to me also.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Not surprising, as the market has broadly moved on from add-in
| cards in favor of smaller form factors and external devices,
| absent some notable holdouts in specific verticals.
|
| Gonna miss it, though. If they had reduced the add-in card slots
| to something more reasonable, lowered the entry price, and given
| us multi-socket options for the CPU (2x M# Ultras? _4x_?), it
| could have been an interesting HPC or server box - though they've
| long since moved away from that in software land, so that was
| always but a fantasy.
|
| At least the Mac Studio and Minis are cute little boxes.
| cco wrote:
| I kinda would have loved a new Mac Pro, same case, but just stick
| 4 Mac Studios in there and connect them all via MLX.
|
| Would be a killer local AI setup...for $40k.
| drnick1 wrote:
| This makes sense, for that kind of money you could always build a
| beastly workstation in a real ATX case with standard components.
| Install Linux and the Mac looks like an expensive toy in
| comparison.
| chaostheory wrote:
| The price to value for the Mac Pro kept going down. Mac Studio
| made more sense.
| chvid wrote:
| The only thing that is missing from the current Mac line up is a
| one rack unit machine.
| magarnicle wrote:
| They had that with the previous gen mini, but the new ones are
| too tall now.
| throwaway85825 wrote:
| For AI Apple internally has rack mounted M chips but they wont
| sell them to the public.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I guess A/V pros are used to getting screwed constantly, but it
| must be really irritating to face the prospect of eventually
| having to move PCI add-in cards to TB5 enclosures that cost $1000
| per slot.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| I see retail 3 slots for $1800, so a lot cheaper than you
| think. They can move to a Studio and buy a box for less than a
| Mac Pro replacement would cost.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Good, Mac Pro was fugly.
|
| I like Apple when they make pretty stuff. Especially small,
| shiny, and quiet.
| chatmasta wrote:
| I bet there's gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in
| June.
|
| Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home
| inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple
| in terms of unified memory and single machines for high
| throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build?
|
| When it comes to the previous "pro workloads," like video
| rendering or software compilation, you've always been able to
| build a PC that outperforms any Apple machine at the same price
| point. But inference is unique because its performance scales
| with high memory throughput, and you can't assemble that by
| wiring together off the shelf parts in a consumer form factor.
|
| It's simply not possible to DIY a homelab inference server better
| than the M3+ for inference workloads, at anywhere close to its
| price point.
|
| They are perfectly positioned to capitalize on the next few years
| of model architecture developments. No wonder they haven't
| bothered working on their own foundation models... they can let
| the rest of the industry do their work for them, and by the time
| their Gemini licensing deal expires, they'll have their pick of
| the best models to embed with their hardware.
| HerbManic wrote:
| Jeff Geerling doing that 1.5TB cluster using 4 Mac Studios was
| pretty much all the proof needed to demo how the Mac Pro is
| struggling to find any place any more.
|
| https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/15-tb-vram-on-mac-stu...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| But those Thunderbolt links are slower than modern PCIe. If
| there's actually a M5-based Mac Studio with the same
| Thunderbolt support, you'll be better off e.g. for LLM
| inference, streaming read-only model weights from storage as
| we've seen with recent experiments than pushing the same
| amount of data via Thunderbolt. It's only if you want to go
| beyond local memory constraints (e.g. larger contexts) that
| the Thunderbolt link becomes useful.
| wpm wrote:
| Why everyone wants to live in dongle/external cabling/dock
| hell is beyond me. PCIe cards are powered internally with
| no extra cables. They are secure. They do not move or fall
| off of shit. They do not require cable management or
| external power supplies. They do not have to talk to the
| CPU through a stupid USB hub or a Thunderbolt dock. Crappy
| USB HDMI capture on my Mac led me to running a fucking PC
| with slots to capture video off of a 50 foot HDMI cable,
| that then streamed the feed to my Mac from NDI, because it
| was more reliable than the elgarbo capture dongle I was
| using. This shit is _bad_. It sucks. It 's twice the price
| and half the quality of a Blackmagic Design capture card.
| But, no slots, so I guess I can go get fucked.
| wtallis wrote:
| For anything that's even somewhat in the consumer space
| rather than pure workstation/professional, the main
| reason is that dongles can be used with a laptop but add-
| in cards can't. When ordinary consumer PCs (or even
| office PCs) are in the picture, laptops are a _huge_
| chunk of the target audience.
|
| The market segments that can afford to ignore laptops and
| only target permanently-installed desktops are mostly
| those niches where the desktop is installed alongside
| some other piece of equipment that is _much_ more
| expensive.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Wasn't streaming models from storage into limited memory a
| case where it was impressive that you could make the
| elephant dance at all?
|
| If you want to get usable speeds from very large models
| that haven't been quantitized to death on local machines,
| RDMA over Thunderbolt enables that use case.
|
| Consumer PC GPUs don't have enough RAM, enterprise GPUs
| that can handle the load very well are obscenely expensive,
| Strix Halo tops out at 128 Gigs of RAM and is limited on
| Thunderbolt ports.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The bad performance you saw was with _very_ limited
| memory and very large models, so streaming weights from
| storage was a huge bottleneck. If you gradually increase
| RAM, more and more of the weights are cached and the
| speed improves quite a bit, at least until you 're
| running huge contexts and most of the RAM ends up being
| devoted to that. Is the overall speed "usable"? That's
| highly subjective, but with local inference it's
| convenient to run 24x7 and rely on non-interactive use.
| Of course scaling out via RDMA on Thunderbolt is still
| there as an option, it's just not the first approach
| you'd try.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| If you don't care about performance, you have a lot of
| options.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > If you gradually increase RAM, more and more of the
| weights are cached and the speed improves quite a bit
|
| It'll increase a lot based on the zero-ram baseline. But
| it's still complete garbage compared to fitting the model
| in RAM. Even if you fit _most_ of it in RAM you 're still
| probably an order of magnitude slower than fitting all of
| it in RAM, most of your time spent waiting for your SSD.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That is the proof what is left is a workaround, just like
| pilling minis on racks because Apple left the server space.
|
| Also why Swift nowadays has to have good Linux support, if
| app developers want to share code with the server.
| coldtea wrote:
| A workaround that works is better than an official solution
| that's barely adequate. Which is often the case.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Or just maybe, to use a Steve Jobs quote, one is holding
| it wrong and should look elsewhere.
| coldtea wrote:
| People sneer at this Steve Jobs quote, but almost anybody
| working in tech had at some point quoted another,
| stronger, quote like "We tried to make the program idiot
| proof, but they keep making better idiots".
|
| There's also: "Programming today is a race between
| software engineers striving to build bigger and better
| idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce
| bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is
| winning."
|
| https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rick_Cook
| mixdup wrote:
| The proposition of a Mac Pro in the Apple Silicon world
| wasn't necessarily about performance, it was about the
| existence of the PCIe slots. I don't think AI becoming a
| workload for pro Macs means the Mac Pro doesn't have a place,
| people who were using Mac Pros for audio or video capture
| didn't stop doing that media work and switched to AI as a
| profession. That market just wasn't big enough to sustain the
| Mac Pro in the first place and Apple has finally acknowledged
| that fact
| grahamlee wrote:
| so many peripherals now come in external boxes that
| communicate _incredibly quickly_ over Thunderbolt 4/5 that
| the need for PCIe is marginal, while the cost to support it
| is significant.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I had a U-Audio PCI card in a Mac Pro during the Intel era
| of Macs. It was a chip to run their software plugins and
| the plugins are top of the line. I have a U-Audio box that
| runs over Thunderbolt now. I know there are people who need
| device slots, but it's vanishingly few. I'm disappointed
| that this category of machine is going away, but it stopped
| being for me in the Apple Silicon era.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Wow spend 40k to get the same tokens/second in QWEN as you
| would on a 3090
|
| I have a feeling that Mac fans obsess more about being able
| to run large models at unusably slow speeds instead of
| actually using said models for anything.
| rubyn00bie wrote:
| I don't think Apple just stumbled into it, and while I totally
| agree that Apple is killing it with their unified memory, I
| think we're going to see a pivot from NVidia and AMD. The
| biggest reason, I think, is: OpenAI has committed to enormous
| amount capex it simply cannot afford. It does not have the lead
| it once did, and most end-users simply do not care. There are
| no network effects. Anthropic at this point has completely
| consumed, as far as I can tell, the developer market. The one
| market that is actually passionate about AI. That's largely due
| to huge advantage of the developer space being, end users
| cannot tell if an "AI" coded it or a human did. That's not true
| for almost every other application of AI at this point.
|
| If the OpenAI domino falls, and I'd be happy to admit if I'm
| wrong, we're going to see a near catastrophic drop in prices
| for RAM and demand by the hyperscalers to well... scale. That
| massive drop will be completely and utterly OpenAI's fault for
| attempting to bite off more than it can chew. In order to shore
| up demand, we'll see NVidia and AMD start selling directly to
| consumers. We, developers, are consumers and drive demand at
| the enterprises we work for based on what keeps us both engaged
| and productive... the end result being: the ol' profit flywheel
| spinning.
|
| Both NVidia and AMD are capable of building GPUs that
| absolutely wreck Apple's best. A huge reason for this is Apple
| _needs_ unified memory to keep their money maker (laptops)
| profitable and performant; and while, it helps their
| profitability it also forces them into less performant
| solutions. If NVidia dropped a 128GB GPU with GDDR7 at $4k--
| absolutely no one would be looking for a Mac for inference. My
| 5090 is unbelievably fast at inference even if it can 't load
| gigantic models, and quite frankly the 6-bit quantized versions
| of Qwen 3.5 are fantastic, but if it _could_ load larger open
| weight models I wouldn 't even bother checking Apple's pricing
| page.
|
| tldr; competition is as stiff as it is vicious-- Apple's "lead"
| in inference is only because NVidia and AMD are raking in cash
| selling to hyperscalers. If that cash cow goes tits up, there's
| no reason to assume NVidia and AMD won't definitively pull the
| the rug out from Apple.
| pjmlp wrote:
| No one cares about Metal in that space, plus CUDA already has
| unified memory for a while.
|
| https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-programming-
| guide/04-speci...
|
| Can we also stop giving Apple some prize for unified memory?
|
| It was the way of doing graphics programming on home
| computers, consoles and arcades, before dedicated 3D cards
| became a thing on PC and UNIX workstations.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Can we please stop treating this like some 2000s Mac vs PC
| flame war where you feel the need go full whataboutism
| whenever anyone acknowledges any positive attribute of any
| Apple product? If you actually read back over the comments
| you're replying to, you'll see that you're not actually
| correcting anything that anyone actually said. This shit is
| so tiring.
| pjmlp wrote:
| You mean like the Neo marketing materials put out by
| Apple?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > A huge reason for this is Apple _needs_ unified memory to
| keep their money maker (laptops) profitable and performant
|
| None of the things people care about really get much out of
| "unified memory". GPUs need a lot of memory bandwidth, but
| CPUs generally don't and it's rare to find something which is
| memory bandwidth bound on a CPU that doesn't run better on a
| GPU to begin with. Not having to copy data between the CPU
| and GPU is nice on paper but again there isn't much in the
| way of workloads where that was a significant bottleneck.
|
| The "weird" thing Apple is doing is using normal DDR5 with a
| wider-than-normal memory bus to feed their GPUs instead of
| using GDDR or HBM. The disadvantage of this is that it has
| less memory bandwidth than GDDR for the same width of the
| memory bus. The advantage is that normal RAM costs less than
| GDDR. Combined with the discrete GPU market using "amount of
| VRAM" as the big feature for market segmentation, a Mac with
| >32GB of "VRAM" ended up being interesting even if it only
| had half as much memory bandwidth, because it still had more
| than a typical PC iGPU.
|
| The sad part is that DDR5 is the thing that _doesn 't_ need
| to be soldered, unlike GDDR. But then Apple solders it
| anyway.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| > Not having to copy data between the CPU and GPU is nice
| on paper but again there isn't much in the way of workloads
| where that was a significant bottleneck.
|
| Isn't that also because that's world we have optimized
| workloads for?
|
| If the common hardware had unified memory, software would
| have exploited _that_ I imagine. Hardware and software is
| in a co-evolutionary loop.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Sort of?
|
| Part of the problem is that there is actually a reason
| for the distinction, because GPUs need faster memory but
| faster memory is more expensive, so then it makes sense
| to have e.g. 8GB of GDDR for the GPU and 32GB of DDR for
| the CPU, because that costs way less than 40GB of GDDR.
| So there is an incentive for many systems to exist that
| do it that way, and therefore a disincentive to write
| anything that assumes copying between them is free
| because it would run like trash on too large a proportion
| of systems even if some large plurality of them had
| unified memory.
|
| A sensible way of doing this is to use a cache hierarchy.
| You put e.g. 8GB of expensive GDDR/HBM on the APU package
| (which can still be upgraded by replacing the APU) and
| then 32GB of less expensive DDR in slots on the system
| board. Then you have "unified memory" without needing to
| buy 40GB of GDDR. The first 8GB is faster and the CPU and
| GPU both have access to both. It's kind of surprising
| that this configuration isn't more common. Probably the
| main thing you'd need is for the APU to have a direct
| power connector like a GPU so you're not trying to
| deliver most of a kilowatt through the socket in high end
| configurations, but that doesn't explain why e.g. there
| is no 65W CPU + 100W GPU with a bit of GDDR to be put in
| the existing 170W AM5 socket.
|
| However, even if that was everywhere, it's still doesn't
| necessarily imply there are a lot of things that could do
| much with it. You would need something that
| simultaneously requires more single-thread performance
| than you can get from a GPU, more parallel computation
| than you can get from a high-end CPU, and requires a
| large amount of data to be repeatedly shared between
| those subsets of the computation. Such things probably
| exist but it's not obvious that they're very common.
| jeffffff wrote:
| > None of the things people care about really get much out
| of "unified memory". GPUs need a lot of memory bandwidth,
| but CPUs generally don't and it's rare to find something
| which is memory bandwidth bound on a CPU that doesn't run
| better on a GPU to begin with. Not having to copy data
| between the CPU and GPU is nice on paper but again there
| isn't much in the way of workloads where that was a
| significant bottleneck.
|
| the bottleneck in lots of database workloads is memory
| bandwidth. for example, hash join performance with a build
| side table that doesn't fit in L2 cache. if you analyze
| this workload with perf, assuming you have a well written
| hash join implementation, you will see something like 0.1
| instructions per cycle, and the memory bandwidth will be
| completely maxed out.
|
| similarly, while there have been some attempts at GPU
| accelerated databases, they have mostly failed exactly
| because the cost of moving data from the CPU to the GPU is
| too high to be worth it.
|
| i wish aws and the other cloud providers would offer arm
| servers with apple m-series levels of memory bandwidth per
| core, it would be a game changer for analytical databases.
| i also wish they would offer local NVMe drives with
| reasonable bandwidth - the current offerings are terrible
| (https://databasearchitects.blogspot.com/2024/02/ssds-have-
| be...)
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > the bottleneck in lots of database workloads is memory
| bandwidth.
|
| It can be depending on the operation and the system, but
| database workloads also tend to run on servers that have
| significantly more memory bandwidth:
|
| > i wish aws and the other cloud providers would offer
| arm servers with apple m-series levels of memory
| bandwidth per core, it would be a game changer for
| analytical databases.
|
| There are x64 systems with that. Socket SP5 (Epyc) has
| ~600GB/s per socket and allows two-socket systems, Intel
| has systems with up to 8 sockets. Apple Silicon maxes out
| at ~800GB/s (M3 Ultra) with 28-32 cores (20-24 P-cores)
| and one "socket". If you drop a pair of 8-core CPUs in a
| dual socket x64 system you would have ~1200GB/s and 16
| cores (if you're trying to maximize memory bandwidth per
| core).
|
| The "problem" is that system would take up the same
| amount of rack space as the same system configured with
| 128-core CPUs or similar, so most of the cloud providers
| will use the higher core count systems for virtual
| servers, and then they have the same memory bandwidth per
| socket and correspondingly less per core. You could
| probably find one that offers the thing you want if you
| look around (maybe Hetzner dedicated servers?) but you
| can expect it to be more expensive per core for the same
| reason.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| >The sad part is that DDR5 is the thing that doesn't need
| to be soldered, unlike GDDR. But then Apple solders it
| anyway.
|
| Apple needs to solder it because they are attaching it
| directly to the SOC to minimize lead length and that is
| part of how they are able to get that bandwidth.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Systems with socketed RAM have had on-die memory
| controllers for more than two decades. CAMM2 supports the
| same speeds as Apple is using in the M5.
| nsteel wrote:
| Except they don't use DDR5. LPDDR5 is always soldered.
| LPDDR5 requires short point-to-point connections to give
| you good SI at high speeds and low voltages. To get the
| same with DDR5 DIMMs, you'd have something physically much
| bigger, with way worse SI, with higher power, and with
| higher latency. That would be a much worse solution. GDDR
| is much higher power, the solution would end up bigger.
| Plus it's useless for system memory so now you need two
| memory types. LPDDR5 is the only sensible choice.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Is it really useless for system memory or is it just too
| expensive and no manufacturer has bothered?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > LPDDR5 is always soldered.
|
| No it isn't:
|
| https://www.newegg.com/crucial-32gb-ddr5-7500-cas-
| latency-cl...
|
| CAMM2 is new and most of the PC companies aren't using it
| yet but it's exactly the sort of thing Apple used to be
| an early adopter of when they wanted to be.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| It looks like LPCAMM2 is shipping from one vendor and
| only started shipping in October- that's a bit quick and
| early for Apple to adopt.
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| Nvidia is definitely preparing for this with the Opensource
| LLMs they are currently developing
| wolfhumble wrote:
| > tldr; competition is as stiff as it is vicious-- Apple's
| "lead" in inference is only because NVidia and AMD are raking
| in cash selling to hyperscalers. If that cash cow goes tits
| up, there's no reason to assume NVidia and AMD won't
| definitively pull the the rug out from Apple.
|
| These companies always try to preserve price segmentation, so
| I don't have high hopes they'd actually do that. Consumer
| machines still get artificially held back on basic things
| like ECC memory, after all . . .
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| For LLMs and other pure memory-bound workloads, but for eg.
| diffusion models their FPU SIMD performance is lacking.
| robotswantdata wrote:
| DGX workstations, expensive but allow PCI cards as well.
|
| https://marketplace.nvidia.com/en-us/enterprise/personal-ai-...
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| How much do those workstations cost? All of the different
| manufacturers links on that page lack pricing info and you
| have to contact them for pricing.
| cudima wrote:
| $4000
| eitally wrote:
| $4k is for GB10 (DGX Spark reference design). $90-100k is
| for GB300 (DGX Station reference design).
| fotcorn wrote:
| Cheapest i know if is around $96k
| fooker wrote:
| It's hilarious that not a single one of these has pricing
| listed anywhere public.
|
| I don't think they expect anyone to actually buy these.
|
| Most companies looking to buy these for developers would
| ideally have multiple people share one machine and that sort
| of an arrangement works much more naturally with a managed
| cloud machine instead of the tower format presented here.
|
| Confirming my hypothesis, this category of devices more or
| less absent in the used market. The only DGX workstation on
| ebay has a GPU from 2017, several generations ago.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I don't think it's so odd, very few products above ~$50k
| have final prices listed for anyone to buy 1-click.
| fooker wrote:
| Workstations above 50k are not that uncommon.
|
| Older xeon based workstations easily reach that number.
| tecleandor wrote:
| If you put a 50 or 80K workstation in the HP store, it
| will say:
|
| "Purchasing limit reached. To complete your order and
| provide you with the best customer experience, please
| call 1-877-888-8235"
| chatmasta wrote:
| Nvidia doesn't list prices because they don't sell the
| machines themselves. If you click through each of those
| links, the prices are listed on the distributor's website.
| For example the Dell Pro Max with GB10 is $4,194.34 and you
| can even click "Add to Cart."
| fooker wrote:
| I don't mean the small GB10s.
|
| If you try to find the pricing of the GB300 towers even
| on the manufacturer sites, you'll see that it's not
| listed for any of the six or so models.
| tecleandor wrote:
| Because that's a different price point, that's getting
| near 100K, and the availability is very limited. I don't
| think they're even selling it openly, just to a bunch of
| partners...
|
| The MSI workstation is the one that is showing some
| pricing around. Seems like some distributors are quoting
| USD96K, and have a wait time of 4 to 6 weeks [0]. Other
| say 90K and also out of stock [1]
|
| -- 0: https://www.cdw.com/product/msi-
| nvidia-gb300-wkstn-72c-grace-cpu/9087313?pfm=srh 1:
| https://www.centralcomputer.com/msi-ct60-s8060-nvidia-
| dgx-station-cpu-memory-up-to-496gb-lpddr5x-nvidia-
| blackwell-ultra-gpu-1x-10-gbe-2x-400-gbe.html
| Melatonic wrote:
| Isnt that because nobody has released one yet? They are
| brand new
| deelowe wrote:
| There were plenty of them around when I worked at Nvidia.
| They definitely exist.
| fooker wrote:
| You have seen plenty of third party GB300 DGX
| workstations?
| bluedino wrote:
| 'Important' people in organizations get them. They either
| ask for them, or the team that manages the shared GPU
| resources gets tired of their shit and they just give them
| one.
| fooker wrote:
| Yes, I agree this is the use case.
|
| Since the user here is not paying for it directly, the
| manufacturer does not have any incentive to list prices
| anywhere.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Still, running 2 to 4 5090 will beat anything Apple has to
| offer for both inference and training.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| That won't work for the home hobbyist 2.4KW of GPU alone plus
| a 350W threadripper pro with enough PCIe lanes to feed them.
| You're looking at close to twice the average US household
| electricity circuit's capacity just to run the machine under
| load.
|
| A cluster of 4 Apple's M3 ultra Mac studios by comparisons
| will consume near 1100W under load.
| bluedino wrote:
| I mean if a hobbyist can run a welder or cnc machine in
| their home workshop...
| mitjam wrote:
| I would say 1-2 RTX 6000 Pro maxQ are more practical.
| port11 wrote:
| As to _better_ or _cheaper_ homelab: depends on the build. AMD
| AI Max builds do exist, and they also use unified memory. I
| could argue the competition was, for a long time, selling much
| more affordable RAM, so you could get a better build outside
| Apple Silicon.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Agreed. I'm planning on selling my 512GB M3 Ultra Studio in the
| next week or so (I just wrenched my back so I'm on bed-rest for
| the next few days) with an eye to funding the M5 Ultra Studio
| when it's announced at WWDC.
|
| I can live without the RAM for a couple of months to get a good
| price for it, especially since Apple don't sell that model
| (with the RAM) any more.
| wolfhumble wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, where do you think is the best place
| to sell a machine like that with the lowest risk of being
| scammed, while still getting the best possible price?
|
| Wish you a speedy recovery for your back!
| asimovDev wrote:
| lowest is probably an apple trade in if available, but i
| can't imagine how bad of a price hit it will be.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| I checked, it's terrible. They don't take into account
| the size of the RAM in the machine, so you get the base-
| model trade-in value (PS1280). Yeah, no.
| polshaw wrote:
| sounds like 100% risk of getting scammed
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| > Just out of curiosity, where do you think is the best
| place to sell a machine like that with the lowest risk of
| being scammed, while still getting the best possible price?
|
| There are none currently on eBay.co.uk, so I'm going to try
| there. I'll also try some of the reddit UK-specific groups.
|
| As far as not being scammed - it's a really high value one-
| off sale, so it'll either be local pickup (and cash / bank-
| transfer at the time, which happens in seconds in the UK)
| or escrow.com (for non-eBay) with the buyer paying all the
| fees etc.
|
| I'd prefer local pickup because then I have the money, the
| buyer can see it working, verify everything to their
| satisfaction etc. etc.
|
| > Wish you a speedy recovery for your back!
|
| Thank you :) It is a little better today. Sitting down is
| now tolerable for short periods... :)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| doesn't escrow.com charge a 50$/pound minimum fees.
|
| I do know that Escrow.com is one of the most reputable
| escrow platforms, on a more personal note, I would love
| to know a escrow service where I can just sell the spare
| domains I have (I have got some .com/.net domains for 1$
| back during a deal for a provider), is there any
| particular escrow service which might not charge a lot
| and I can get a few dollars from selling them as some of
| those domains aren't being used by me.
|
| > Thank you :) It is a little better today. Sitting down
| is now tolerable for short periods... :)
|
| I am wishing you speedy recovery as well. A cowboy gotta
| have a strong back :-)
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| According to the calculator, it'd be about PS280 assuming
| the purchase cost was PS11k. I think that's probably an
| upper-bound on the sale-price, though I can see bids of
| $20k on eBay.com for the same model.
|
| I sold a domain via escrow.com a long time ago now (20
| years or so) but the buyer paid fees, so I don't know
| what they charge for that. You could try the calculator
| they have though (https://www.escrow.com/fee-calculator)
|
| And thanks for the good wishes :)
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Probably ebay
| nottorp wrote:
| Hey didn't they drop the 512 Gb model?
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/03/06/forget-512gb-
| ram-...
|
| You may want to hold on to your M3 Ultra! There's no
| guarantee there will be a M5 Ultra with 512 Gb ram.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| I don't actually use the memory anywhere near as much as I
| thought I would. 256GB would be fine for me :)
| nottorp wrote:
| Heh, my main "heavy stuff" desktop only has 64GB.
|
| But it feels really good to have more ram than you can
| think of a use for.
|
| I have a faint memory of an interview ages ago with Knuth
| I think where he mentioned as an aside he was using a
| workstation with 3.2 Gb of storage and 4 Gb of ram :)
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Around the year 2001 I recall watching 3d studio Max R3
| tutorials in which the teacher had an electric purple
| desktop which possessed an entire 4 gigs of ram. It blew
| my mind. My computer had 128mb and an ATI Rage 128 Pro.
|
| I was young and dumb and never would have guessed I'd own
| a computer with 32gb of RAM that felt pitifully
| underpowered for today's tasks.
| nottorp wrote:
| Humm purple and 4 gigs of ram in 2001 sounds like SGI.
| But those purple SGIs ran Irix so no 3d studio.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| You're right! Crazy, that brings me back. I wonder why he
| showed it off. I wish I could find it. He probably wasn't
| using it for the tutorial at all, just nerding out and
| talking about how beefy computers handle rendering and
| complex geometry better.
|
| I was constantly constrained by my computers back then.
| Trying to navigate complex scenes or model very detailed
| meshes could get soooo slow. But man I loved it so much.
| nottorp wrote:
| > I wonder why he showed it off.
|
| Probably because it ran Maya. Which was a SGI product
| back then, not an Autodesk product yet.
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| Framework offers the AI Ryzen Max with 196GB 128GB of unified
| RAM for 2,699$
|
| That's a pretty good deal I would think
|
| https://frame.work/de/de/products/desktop-diy-amd-aimax300/c...
| rl3 wrote:
| 128GB*
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| Thanks for spotting the mistake. No Idea how I got to 192
| rl3 wrote:
| For what it's worth, I really wish that was the actual
| number.
| eigenspace wrote:
| The framework desktop is quite cool, but those Ryzen Max CPUs
| are still a pretty poor competitor to Apple's chips if what
| you care about it running an LLM. Ryzen Max tops out at 256
| GB/s of memory bandwidth, whereas an M4 Max can hit 560 GB/s
| of bandwidth.
|
| So even if the model fits in the memory buffer on the Ryzen
| Max, you're still going to hit something like half the
| tokens/second just because the GPU will be sitting around
| waiting for data.
|
| Personally, I'd rather have the Framework machine, but if
| running local LLMs is your main goal, the offerings from
| Apple are very compelling, even when you adjust for the
| higher price on the Apple machine.
| rl3 wrote:
| There's also the DGX Spark. Granted, its price has been
| going up recently alongside everything else that has memory
| in it.
| eigenspace wrote:
| I haven't heard a single good think about DGX Spark from
| anyone using it, so I'd be pretty wary about that.
| xienze wrote:
| That also has pretty poor memory bandwidth. 283GB/s I
| think.
| rl3 wrote:
| Yeah. The main selling point I'd say is the onboard
| ConnectX-7 hardware.
| freeqaz wrote:
| 128gb is the max RAM that the current Strix Halo supports
| with ~250GB/s of bandwidth. The Mac Studio is 256GB max and
| ~900GB/s of memory bandwidth. They are in different
| categories of performance, even price-per-dollar is worse.
| (~$2700 for Framework Desktop vs $7500 for Mac Studio M3
| Ultra)
| fooker wrote:
| The typical inference workloads have moved quite a bit in the
| last six months or so.
|
| Your point would have been largely correct in the first half of
| 2025.
|
| Now, you're going to have a much better experience with a
| couple of Nvidia GPUs.
|
| This is because of two reasons - the reasoning models require a
| pretty high number of tokens per second to do anything useful.
| And we are seeing small quantized and distilled reasoning
| models working almost as well as the ones needing terabytes of
| memory.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > But inference is unique because its performance scales with
| high memory throughput, and you can't assemble that by wiring
| together off the shelf parts in a consumer form factor.
|
| Nvidia outperforms Mac significantly on diffusion inference and
| many other forms. It's not as simple as the current Mac chips
| are entirely better for this.
| rafram wrote:
| But where are you going to find an Nvidia GPU with 128+ GB of
| memory at an enthusiast-compatible price?
| ricardobayes wrote:
| That might even be true, but how large is the TAM for such
| machines?
| edelans wrote:
| and let alone competing on the energy consumption!
| sippeangelo wrote:
| Some Chinese sources sell modded Nvidia GPUs with extra
| VRAM. They're quite affordable in comparison to even a Mac
| Pro.
| giwook wrote:
| And how much do you trust Chinese hardware?
| x______________ wrote:
| When there's no one left to trust, maybe you need to re-
| evaluate your criteria.
| sgc wrote:
| I wouldn't say that's true or even likely. It's
| completely possible to be in a pit of vipers where every
| single snake is venomous, and that is pretty much what we
| are seeing: With technological advances, there is a
| certain subset of people that will use them primarily to
| solidify their power and control over others. There is no
| utopian society right now whose government doesn't look
| to spy through technology, which of course is best set up
| at time of manufacture.
| x______________ wrote:
| Agreed. Unless you have full control over the production
| chain to fully produce a device, you are subject to the
| whims and desires of those who preside over such
| technological feats that we take for granted in our daily
| lives.
|
| To the original point, it's safe to say that highlighting
| a nationality with regards to trust is baseless and
| without merit, as would be for any other topic (men/women
| from x are y, z food is better here, etc..). Real life is
| much more complicated and nuanced past nationalities.
| Some might call it FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) but
| there's always a deeper rationale at the individual level
| as well.
| sgc wrote:
| Rather than people being wary of Chinese in general, it's
| more that there is a high degree of government control
| exercised in China and they are known to be very
| strategic with long-term planning in regards to
| technology control both for spying and actual remote
| control of devices. We are all just looking for the least
| bad option. It's not like devices from other countries
| are immune, but they are often less organized so there is
| a better chance of avoiding the Chinese level of planned
| access.
|
| It does seem like pretty low risk in this specific case
| so I agree OP's comment was bit over the top, but I would
| have no way to make anything resembling even an educated
| guess as to how far their programs go.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Give that most of mine, and probably yours, and probably
| most of the world's computers are in fact made in China
| one way or another, some higher percentage than others,
| I'm guessing most of us trust our hardware enough to
| continue using it.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| The Mac is also chinese hardware
| platevoltage wrote:
| It would be hilarious if you are using a Lenovo device
| right now.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Any links to them? Never heard of this..
| giobox wrote:
| It's been going on for a while. Search YouTube or the web
| for 48gb 4090 (this is one of the most popular modded
| Nvidia cards), Nvidia of course never officially made a
| 4090 with this much memory.
|
| There are some on sale via eBay right now. The memory
| controllers on some Nvidia gpus support well beyond the
| 16-24gb they shipped with as standard, and enterprising
| folks in China desolder the original memory chips and fit
| higher capacity ones.
| elorant wrote:
| Go at ebay and search for RTX 4090 48GBs. There's plenty
| of them with prices around $3.5k
| noboostforyou wrote:
| I've seen a guy who sells modded 2080 Ti with 22gb for
| $500
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/chinese-
| work...
|
| There's also unreleased Nvidia engineering samples of
| cards with doubled VRAM like this - https://www.reddit.co
| m/r/nvidia/comments/1rczghu/update_unre...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Where are you gonna find Apple hardware with 128GB of
| memory at enthusiast-compatible price?
|
| The cheapest Apple desktop with 128GB of memory shows up as
| costing $3499 for me, which isn't very "enthusiast-
| compatible", it's about 3x the minimum salary in my
| country!
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> it 's about 3x the minimum salary in my country!_
|
| Enthusiast compute hardware doesn't cater to the people
| on the minimum salary in any country, let alone
| developing nations. When Ferrari makes a car they don't
| ask themselves if people on minimum salary will be able
| to afford them.
|
| In in the bottom two poorest EU member states and Apple
| and Microsoft Xbox don't even bother to have a direct to
| customer store presence here, you buy them from third
| party retailers.
|
| Why? Probably because their metrics show people here are
| too poor to afford their products en-masse to be worth
| operating a dedicated sales entity. Even though plenty of
| people do own top of the line Macbooks here, it's just
| the wealthy enthusiast niche, but it's still a niche for
| the volumes they (wish to)operate at. Why do you think
| Apple launched the Mac Neo?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Right, I think maybe we're then talking about "upper
| class enthusiasts" or something in reality then? I
| understood that to juts be about the person, not what
| economic class they were in, maybe I misunderstood.
| Heliosmaster wrote:
| Yes, it's a different definition.
|
| Enthusiast in this contest more or less means you are
| excited enough about something to get a level above what
| normal people should get and just below professional
| pricing. An enthusiast camera body can be 2000 euros.
|
| I would say an enthusiast computer is 2-4k.
|
| It really depends what you meant with minimum salary
| (yearly?) because paying 3 months of salary for a
| computer like that isn't far fetched. You're not using
| this to generate recipes for cookies. An enthusiast level
| car is expensive as well.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> Right, I think maybe we're then talking about "upper
| class enthusiasts" or something in reality then?_
|
| Why? Enthusiasts are by definition people for whom value
| for money is not the main driver but top performance and
| cutting edge novelty at any cost. Affording enthusiast
| computer hardware is not a human right same how affording
| a Lamborghini or McMansion isn't.
|
| But you don't need to buy a Lamborghini to do your
| grocery shopping or drive your kids to school, same how
| you don't need an Nvidia 5090 or MacBook Pro Max to do
| your taxes or do your school work.
|
| So the definition is fine as it is. It's hardware for
| people with very deep pockets, often called whales.
| 0x457 wrote:
| enthusiasts in computer hardware assumes enthusiasm about
| hardware, not about "hardware on an budget". It doesn't
| matter if it's afforable or not.
| kaashif wrote:
| Apple is not catering to minimum salaries in poor
| countries. Does this really need to be explained?
|
| $3499 is definitely enthusiast compatible. That's beefy
| gaming PC tier, which is possibly the canonical example
| of an enthusiast market.
|
| This isn't tens of thousands of dollars for top tier
| Nvidia chips we're talking about.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Seems I misunderstood what a "enthusiast" is, I thought
| it was about someone "excited about something" but seems
| the typical definition includes them having a lot of
| money too, my bad.
| darkwater wrote:
| An enthusiast in the hobby space is by definition someone
| willing to pour much more money that someone else not
| that enthusiast in whichever hobby we are talking about.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Well, and also _has_ a bunch of money, not just willing.
| I guess locally we don 't really have that difference, as
| two other commentators here went by, that's why I had to
| update my local understanding of "enthusiast". Usually we
| use it for how engaged/interested a person is, regardless
| of how much money they can or are willing to use.
|
| Learned something new today at least, so that's cool :)
| darkwater wrote:
| In a hobby where there are (strong) HW requirements, it
| mostly takes for granted you have money to shell out for
| your hobby, indeed.
| sgc wrote:
| Yes, when tech gear is sold as 'enthusiast' gear, it is
| almost invariably the most expensive non-professional
| tier of equipment. That is roughly the common
| understanding: Expensive and focused on features more
| than security required for public use; while remaining
| within reach of at least some individuals, not only
| corporations.
| pchristensen wrote:
| $3.5k is a lot of money, but not a ton by American hobby
| standards. It's easy to spend multiples, even orders of
| magnitude more than that on hobbies like fishing, wine,
| sports tickets, concerts, scuba, travel, being a foodie,
| golf, marathons, collectibles, etc.
|
| It's out of reach for lots of people, even in developed
| countries. But it's easily within reach for loads of
| people that care more about computing than other stuff.
| oxfeed65261 wrote:
| In June 1977, the base Apple II model with 4 KB of RAM
| was $1,298 (equivalent to about $6,900 in 2025), and with
| the maximum 48 KB of RAM it was $2,638 (equivalent to
| about $14,000 in 2025).
|
| (Source: Wikipedia via Claude Opus)
| prewett wrote:
| Wow, 48k for $14000. Now you can get a MBP with a
| _million_ times more memory for $3500 or so. Whereas that
| CPU was clocked at 1 MHz, so CPUs are only several
| thousand times faster, maybe something like 30,000 times
| faster if you can make use of multi-core.
| chirau wrote:
| I live in America, I am very well compensated. Have been
| for 15 years now. $3500 is a lot of money. A lot. There
| is a tiny bubble of us tech folks who think it is
| accessible to most people. It is not. It is also the same
| reason Macs are still a niche. Don't take your circles to
| be the standard, it is very very far from it, especially
| if you think $3500 is not a lot of money.
|
| It is easy to confirm this, just look at the sales number
| of these $3500 devices. It is definitely not an
| enthusiast price point, even in the US.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| It's a midrange to upper expense in the US _if it's your
| hobby_. Most people don't have a serious computer hobby
| but they golf, trade ATVs, travel, drink, etc.
| tracker1 wrote:
| It's not nothing for most people... it's more than a
| month of rent/mortgage for a significant number of
| Americans even. But if it's your primary hobby, it's not
| completely out of reach, and it's not something you
| necessarily spend every year. A lot of people will
| upgrade to a new computer every 3-5 years and maybe
| upgrade something in between those complete system
| upgrades.
|
| I know plenty of people who don't make a lot of money
| (say top 25% or so) that will have a Boat or RV that
| costs more than a $3500 computer, and balk at the thought
| of spending that much on a computer. It just depends on
| where your interests are.
| jltsiren wrote:
| $3500 would have been 3-4 months' discretionary spending
| as a PhD student in Finland 15 years ago. A sum you might
| choose to spend once a year on something you find
| genuinely interesting.
|
| Some people succumb to lifestyle creep or choose it
| deliberately. Others choose to live below their means
| when their income grows. The latter have a lot more money
| to spend on extras, or to save if that's what they
| prefer.
| pchristensen wrote:
| The first words I said: "$3.5k is a lot of money..."
|
| There are tens of millions of top 10% income adults in
| America. So something can be both unaffordable to most
| people, and also easily accessible to very many people.
| sib wrote:
| There are something like 24 million millionaires in the
| United States... Estimates are that Americans spent $157
| billion on pets in 2025.
|
| There are _a lot_ of people who could easily choose to
| spend $3,500 on a computer.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I'd argue that some of those are more consumption and
| activity than hobby depending on how they're engaged
| with, and that people use the word "hobby" too loosely,
| but would agree that Americans in-particular consume at
| obscene rates.
|
| Golf equipment, mountaineering equipment, skiing and
| snowboarding lift tickets and gear, a single excessive
| graphics card that's only used for increasing frame rates
| marginally, or basically a single extra feature on a car,
| are all things that accumulate quite quickly. Some are
| clearly more superfluous than others and cater to whales,
| while some are just expensive by nature and aren't
| attempting to be anything else
| ua709 wrote:
| Those are the prices for just buying equipment, which at
| least retain some kind of value. 3 million+ American kids
| are enrolled in competitive soccer with annual clubs dues
| between $1K and $5K, and that money is just gone at the
| end of the year. Basically none of those kids are going
| to have a career in soccer, so it's clearly a hobby, and
| everyone knows it. And soccer isn't even the most popular
| sport!
| brailsafe wrote:
| Ya, I guess that's another category entirely. The cost of
| enrolling a kid in anything, potential travel involved
| etc..
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I'm an immigrant to Canada, and yes, English has both
| literal meanings and colloquial meanings.
|
| In the most literal meaning, absolutely, "Enthusiast"
| just means a person who likes something, is excited about
| something.
|
| When it comes to _market_ and products though, typically
| you 'll see the word "Enthusiast" as mid-tier - something
| like: Consumer --> Enthusiast --> Professional (may have
| words like "Prosumer" in there as well etc:)
|
| In that context, which is typically the one people will
| use when discussing product pricing and placement,
| "Enthusiast" is somebody who yes enjoys something, but
| does it sufficiently to be discerning and capable of
| purchasing mid-tier or above hardware.
|
| So while a consumer photographer, may use their phone or
| compact or all-in-one camera, enthusiast photographer
| will probably spend $3000 - $5000 in camera gear.
| Equivalently, there are myriad gamers out there (on
| phones, consoles, Geforce Now, whatever:), an
| _enthusiast_ gamer is assumed to have a dedicated gaming
| computer, probably a tower, with a dedicated video card,
| likely say a 5070ti or above, probably 32GB+ RAM, couple
| of SSDs which are not entry level, etc.
|
| Again, this is not to say a person with limited budget is
| "not a real enthusiast", no gatekeeping is intended here;
| simply, if it may help, what the word means when it comes
| to market segmentation and product pricing :)
| brailsafe wrote:
| Additionally, "enthusiasts"/"hobbyists" tend to be
| willing to spend beyond practical utility, while
| professionals are more interested in pragmatism,
| especially in photography from what I can tell.
|
| If you're an actual pro, you _need_ your stuff to work
| properly, efficiently, reliably, when it 's called for.
| When you're a hobbyist, it's sometimes almost the goal to
| waste money and time on stuff that really doesn't matter
| beyond your interest in it; working on the thing is the
| point, not the value it generates. Pros should spend
| money on good tools and research and knowledge, but it
| usually needs to be an investment, sometimes crossing
| over with hobbyist opinions.
|
| A friend of mine who's a computer hobbyist and retail IT
| tech, making far far less than I do, spends comically
| more than me on hardware to play basically one game. He
| keeps up to date with the latest processors and all that
| stuff, he knows hardware in terms of gaming. I meanwhile
| --despite having more money available--have a fairly
| budget gaming PC that I did build myself, but contains
| entirely old/used components, some of which he just
| needed to get rid of and gave me for free, and I upgrade
| my main mac every 5 years or something. I only upgrade
| when hardware is really getting in my way.
| sib wrote:
| >> So while a consumer photographer, may use their phone
| or compact or all-in-one camera, enthusiast photographer
| will probably spend $3000 - $5000 in camera gear.
|
| It's interesting that you chose photographers as the
| example here. In many cases that I've seen, enthusiast
| photographers spend _much more_ than professional
| photographers on their gear because the photographers
| make their money with their gear and therefore need to
| justify it, while the enthusiasts are often tech people,
| successful doctors, etc., who spend lots and lots on
| money on their hobbies...
|
| In any case, your point stands, that "enthusiast"
| computer users would easily spend $3-4K or more on gear
| to play games, train models, etc.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| For an individual making median income in the US, it
| would cost 2% of your income to get a machine like this
| every 4-5 years. That's a matter of enthusiasm, not a
| matter of having a lot of money. Sorry that income is
| less where you are, but the people talking about the
| product tier are using American standards.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| Did you need to add poor? Unless apple isn't catering to
| the US
| darkwater wrote:
| 1200$ as the minimum salary covers probably 70% of Europe
| by population?
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| The Neo has enough power to do small LLM testing and
| pretty much anything else a bit slowly, and costs $600?
| 0x457 wrote:
| Neo tops at 8GB RAM. What LLM are you going to run there?
| Functiongemma?
|
| It can absolutely do some ML inference on it, but not
| much in terms of LLMs.
| mprovost wrote:
| The original Mac with 128KB of memory cost $2,495 when
| Apple released it in 1984. It would be about 3x that in
| today's money.
| intrasight wrote:
| I came here to say the same. Even with my student
| discount price of $1000, that's over 3K in today's
| dollars.
|
| We are so freaking spoiled by the cheap cost of compute
| now.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I spent aaround that on my current personal desktop...
| 9950X, 2x48gb ddr5/@6000, RX 9070XT, 4tb gen 5 nvme + 4tb
| gen 4 nvme. I could have cut the cpu to a 9800x3d and ram
| to 32gb with a different GPU if my needs/usage were
| different. I'm running in Linux and don't game too much.
|
| That said, a higher end gaming setup is going to cost
| that much and is absolutely in the enthusiast realm.
| "enthusiast" doesn't mean compatible with "minimum wage"
| angoragoats wrote:
| You can still buy used 3090 cards on ebay. 5 of them will
| give you 120GB of memory and will blow away any mac in
| terms of performance on LLM workloads. They have gone up in
| price lately and are now about $1100 each, but at one point
| they were $700-800 each.
| rybosworld wrote:
| I don't see how 5x 3090's is a better option than an M3
| Ultra Mac studio.
|
| The mac will just work for models as large as 100B, can
| go higher with quantized models. And power draw will be
| 1/5th as much as the 3090 setup.
|
| You can certainly daisy chain several 3090's together but
| it doesn't work seamlessly.
| angoragoats wrote:
| > The mac will just work for models as large as 100B, can
| go higher with quantized models. And power draw will be
| 1/5th as much as the 3090 setup.
|
| This setup will work for 100B models as well. And yes,
| the Mac will draw less power, but the Nvidia machine will
| be many times faster. So depending on your specific Mac
| and your specific Nvidia setup, the performance per watt
| will be in the same ballpark. And higher absolute
| performance is certainly a nice perk.
|
| > You can certainly daisy chain several 3090's together
| but it doesn't work seamlessly.
|
| Citation needed; there's no "daisy chaining" in the setup
| I describe, and low level libraries like pytorch as well
| as higher level tools like Ollama all seamlessly support
| multiple GPUs.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| How much does it cost to have an electrician wire up 240v
| circuit just to power the thing?
| angoragoats wrote:
| The machine I'm describing works just fine on a dedicated
| 15A 120V circuit.
| rybosworld wrote:
| I think it's bad form to say "citation needed" when your
| original claim didn't include citations.
|
| Regardless - there's a difference between training and
| inference. And pytorch doesn't magically make 5 gpus
| behave like 1 gpu.
| angoragoats wrote:
| > I think it's bad form to say "citation needed" when
| your original claim didn't include citations.
|
| I apologize, but using multiple GPUs for inference
| (without any sort of "daisy chaining") is something
| that's been supported in most LLM tooling for a long
| time.
|
| > Regardless - there's a difference between training and
| inference.
|
| No one brought up training vs. inference to my knowledge,
| besides you --- I was assuming the machine was for
| inference, because my experience building a machine like
| the one I described was in order to do inference. If you
| want to train models, I know less about that, but I'm
| pretty sure the tooling does easily support multiple GPUs
|
| > And pytorch doesn't magically make 5 gpus behave like 1
| gpu.
|
| I never said it was magic, I just said it was supported,
| which it is.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > You can certainly daisy chain several 3090's together
|
| It's not "daisy chaining" 3090 has NVLink.
| rybosworld wrote:
| Really? How would you NVLink more than 2 3090's?
| angoragoats wrote:
| FWIW I have never used NVLink, and I'm not sure why
| people are bringing up "daisy chaining" because as far as
| I'm aware that is not a thing with modern GPUs at all.
| dabockster wrote:
| You don't need it if you use llamacpp on Windows, or if you
| compile it on Linux with CUDA 13 and the correct kernel HMM
| support, and you're only using MoE models (which, tbh, you
| should be doing anyways).
| 0x457 wrote:
| What MoE has to do with it? Aside from Flash-MoE that
| supports exactly one model and only on macOs - you still
| need to load entire model into memory. You also don't
| know what experts going to be activated, so it's not like
| you can predict which needs to be loaded.
| colechristensen wrote:
| The Nvidia DGX Spark is exactly this and in the same price
| and performance bracket.
| andreybaskov wrote:
| Sadly, memory bandwidth is abysmal compared to Apple
| chips - 273 GB/s vs 614 GB/s on M5 Max for similar price.
| Even though fp4 compute is faster, it doesn't help for
| all the decode heavy agentic workflows.
| chpatrick wrote:
| But they're pretty fast and can have loads of RAM, which
| would be prohibitively expensive with Nvidia.
| chocochunks wrote:
| A 128GB 2TB Dell Pro Max with Nvidia GB10 is about $4200, a
| Mac Studio with 128GB RAM and 2TB storage is $4100. So
| pretty comparable. I think Dell's pricing has been rocked
| more by the RAM shortage too.
| midnight_eclair wrote:
| ~not unified memory tho~
| mciancia wrote:
| It is unified memory on this one
| midnight_eclair wrote:
| my bad
| cestith wrote:
| From the spec sheets I'm looking at, it is not. I'm
| seeing models of the Dell Pro Max with 128 GB of
| DDR5-6400 as CAMM2, then a separate memory of up to 24 GB
| on the GPU. CAMM2 does not make the memory unified.
|
| There are also SO-DIMM options.
| chocochunks wrote:
| You're not looking at the right thing. Dell's naming is
| horrible. Dell Pro Max with GB10
| (https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/cty/pdp/spd/dell-pro-
| max-fcm...). It's a very different computer than what
| you're looking at and has 128GB LPDDR5X unified memory.
| cestith wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out. I found a more informative
| article about that model at https://www.mcpgov.com/dell-
| pro-max-gb10
| ctxc wrote:
| I took ~ to be a "singing tone" for some reason till I
| saw sibling and realized it might be an attempted
| strikethrough xD
| benoau wrote:
| That won't hold much benefit as SOCAMM2 and LPCAMM2 get
| more popular.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Not quite, what is the vRAM bandwidth of each? The
| bandwidth is a huge contributor to LLM performance.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| AFAIK, for the unified bandwidth, it depends mostly on
| the CPU, for M4 Max (I think it's the default today?) it
| does ~550 GB/s, while GB10 does ~270 GB/s, so about a 2x
| difference between the two. For comparison, RTX Pro 6000
| does 1.8 TB/s, pretty much the same as what a 5090 does,
| which is probably the fastest/best GPUs a prosumer
| reasonable could get.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > So pretty comparable.
|
| The Mac Studio almost certainly uses _at least_ half the
| power
|
| (educated guess, I'm too lazy to go look at all the spec
| sheets and run the numbers)
| bigyabai wrote:
| It's actually reversed. The GB10 chipset has a TDP of
| 140w, whereas M2/M3 Ultra pulls over 250w from the wall:
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/102027
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > It's actually reversed. The GB10 chipset has a TDP of
| 140w, whereas M2/M3 Ultra pulls over 250w from the wall
|
| Come on mate ... I think you and I both know I was
| talking about complete system here, not discrete
| components.
|
| I'm pretty sure your total package (Dell Pro Max + GB10)
| will pull more from the wall.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you need to look up what you're talking
| about instead of making a guess.
|
| The Dell Pro Max PSU + enclosure is only rated for 240w,
| it literally can't pull more than 250w from the wall
| without shorting itself.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > 240w
|
| 280w according to the spec sheet I just looked at.
|
| Also just look at the graphs on Geerling's website. The
| Mac Studio eats the Dell for breakfast in a number of the
| tests: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/dells-
| version-dgx-spa...
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Unfortunately the GB10 is incredibly bandwith starved.
| You get 128gb ram, but only 270GB/s bandwidth. The M3
| Ultra mac studio gets you 820GB/s. (The M4 max is at
| 410GB/s. I'm not aware of any workload that gets the GB10
| to it's theoretical peakflops.
| chocochunks wrote:
| You can't get a 128GB M3 Ultra, it's also more expensive.
| For some workloads the Studio is better, for others the
| GB10.
| AdamN wrote:
| Nvidia isn't selling one-off home computers afaik. But yes in
| terms of datacenter cloud usage Nvidia performs.
| newsclues wrote:
| https://marketplace.nvidia.com/en-us/enterprise/personal-
| ai-...
| jamespo wrote:
| Amusingly there's a macbook next to it in the pic, is
| this headless?
| Tsiklon wrote:
| It has a HDMI port and its USB-C ports also support
| display out. But I believe most who buy it intend to use
| it headless. The machine runs Ubuntu 24.04 and has a
| slightly customised Gnome (green accents and an nvidia
| logo in GDM) as its desktop.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| GB300 DGX Station was announced last Monday.
| eitally wrote:
| It's going to cost far more than a diy machine with
| multiple lower end GPUs. Which is fine -- it's aimed at
| enterprise, not home labs.
| wappieslurkz wrote:
| Do NVIDIA solutions also outperform the Apple M-series in
| performance per Watt?
| Lalabadie wrote:
| Probably comparable, but that's only with business-grade
| products, it's why Apple's current silicon is so remarkable
| on the market at the consumer level.
| wappieslurkz wrote:
| Thanks.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| No, that's why Apple uses Performance Per Watt not actual
| performance celling as the metric. In actual workloads
| where you'd need this power then actual performance is what
| matters not PPW.
| jiwidi wrote:
| tell me what pc with an nvidia gpu can you buy with same
| memory and performance.
|
| I never liked apple hardware, but they are now untouchable
| since their shift to own sillicon for home hardware.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > tell me what pc with an nvidia gpu can you buy with same
| memory and performance.
|
| And power consumption !
|
| The performance per watt of Apple is unmatched.
| dabockster wrote:
| This needs to be sold as the big ticket item for low
| level devs. Their chips are some of the most power
| efficient chips on the market right now.
|
| Hoping they release a blade server version somehow.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Nvidia's recent GPUs are more power-efficient than Apple
| Silicon in raster, training and inference workloads.
|
| A blade server would get cancelled just like the Mac Pro
| for exactly the same reasons:
| https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-
| rep...
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Nvidia's recent GPUs are more power-efficient than
| Apple Silicon in raster, training and inference
| workloads.
|
| I think you can do better than the proverbial Apples and
| Oranges comparison.
|
| In terms of total system, "box on desk", Apple is likely
| to remain the performance per watt leader compared to
| random PC workstations with whatever GPUs you put inside.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Then ignore me, and go ask your local datacenter why
| Apple Silicon isn't on any of their racks.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Apple releasing anything enterprise or "server" related
| would be a pretty big pivot - let alone blades.
| saltyoldman wrote:
| I've owned some beefy computers in the past and this tiny
| little m4 mini on my desk blows them all out of the water
| easily. It's crazy.
| angoragoats wrote:
| This has changed since Sam Altman started buying up all the
| chip supply, raising prices on memory, storage, and GPUs
| for everyone, but it used to be the case that you could
| build a PC that was both cheaper and faster than a Mac for
| LLM inference, with roughly equal performance per watt.
|
| You would use multiple *90-series GPUs, throttled down in
| terms of power. Depending on the GPU, the sweet spot is
| between 225-350W, where for LLM workloads you only lose
| 5-10% of performance for a ~50% drop in power consumption.
|
| Combined with a workstation (Xeon/Epyc) CPU with lots of
| PCIe, you can support 6-7 such GPUs (or more, depending on
| available power). This will blow away the fastest Mac
| studio, at a comparable performance per watt.
|
| Again, a lot of this has changed, since GPUs and memory are
| so much more expensive now.
|
| Macs are great for a simpler all in one box with high
| memory bandwidth and middling-to-decent GPU performance,
| but they are (or were) absolutely not "untouchable."
| Detrytus wrote:
| With 6-7 GPUs and EPYC cpu it will also cost 2-3x more
| than a Mac Studio.
| deaddodo wrote:
| I think OP's point was that it would do more than 2-3x
| the workload, thus them stating "blow it out of the
| water" and specifying "performance-per-watt".
| elorant wrote:
| Untouchable my ass. You get a PC that has an ssd glued to
| the motherboard so if you run write intensive workloads and
| that thing wears out replacing it will have significant
| cost. Then there's no PCie slot to get any decent network
| card if you want to work more than one of them in unison,
| you're stuck with that stupid thunderbolt 5 while
| Infiniband gives x10 network speeds. As for memory
| bandwidth, it's fast compared to CPUs but any enterprise
| GPU dwarfs it significantly. The unified RAM is the only
| interesting angle.
|
| Apple could have taken a chunk of the enterprise market now
| with that AI craze if they had made an upgradable and
| expandable server edition based on their silicon. But no,
| everything has to be bolt down and restricted.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for
| home inference machines
|
| For LLMs. For inference with other kinds of models where the
| amount of compute needed relative to the amount of data
| transfer needed is higher, Apple is less ideal and systems worh
| lower memory bandwidth but more FLOPS shine. And if things like
| Google's TurboQuant work out for efficient kv-cache
| quantization, Apple could lose a lot of that edge for LLM
| inference, too, since that would reduce the amount of data
| shuffling relative to compute for LLM inference.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Or just mean that you could run a 5x bigger model on Apple
| than before.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Well, since its kv-cache that TurboQuant optimizes, it
| means five times bigger context fits into RAM, all other
| things being equal, not a five times bigger model. But,
| sure, with any given context size and the same RAM
| available, you can instead fit a bigger model--which also
| takes more compute to get the same performance.
|
| Anything that increases the necessary compute to fully
| utilize RAM bandwidth in optimal LLM serving weakens Apples
| advantage for that.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| how about the newly announced GB300 DGX Workstation?
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Comparing a $100K workstation to a $4K desktop PC seems a bit
| Apples and oranges?
| kranke155 wrote:
| The new M chips beat basically any PC on video editing. Their
| new ProRes accelerator chiplet is so good they can't even
| compete.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Goodluck storing all those 8k videos, plates, and other
| content on soldered in SSD
| SwtCyber wrote:
| The interesting question is whether they'll lean into it
| intentionally (better tooling, more ML-focused APIs) or just
| keep treating it as a side effect of their silicon design
| chatmasta wrote:
| I think we'll see a much more robust ecosystem develop around
| MLX now that agentic coding has reduced the barrier of
| porting and maintaining libraries to it.
| tantalor wrote:
| > home inference machines.
|
| The market for this use case is tiny
| chatmasta wrote:
| For now. In a few years it will be part of every day life,
| because people will see Apple users enjoying it without
| thinking about it. You won't consider it a "home inference
| machine," just a laptop with more capabilities than any other
| vendor offers without a cloud subscription.
| valzam wrote:
| The average person self hosts literally nothing, why would
| it be different for inference? Which benefits severely from
| economies of scale and efficient 24/7 utlization
| diabllicseagull wrote:
| I'm not a big fan of reducing computing as a whole to just
| inference. Apple has done quite a bit besides that and it
| deserves credit. Mac Pro disappearing from the product line is
| a testament to it, that their compact solutions can cover all
| needs, not just local inference, to a degree that an expandable
| tower is not required at all.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Mac Pro disappearing from the product line is a testament
| to it
|
| Apple removing/adding something to their product line matters
| nothing, for all we know, they have a new version ready to be
| launched next month, or whatever. Unless you work at Apple
| and/or have any internal knowledge, this is all just
| guessing, not a "testament" to anything.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Did you read the article?
|
| "Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans
| to offer future Mac Pro hardware."
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I did indeed! Did you read the article? Did you like it?
| Have you also read the HN guidelines by any chance?
|
| None the less, what Apple says or doesn't say doesn't
| really matter. If their plan for a new Mac Pro is secret,
| they'll answer exactly that when someone asks them about
| it. Doesn't mean we won't see new Mac Pro hardware this
| summer. Plenty of cases in the past where they play coy
| and then suddenly, "whoops, we just had to keep it a
| secret, never mind".
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Their compact solution doesn't cover all needs, they just
| decided that they didn't care about some of those needs. The
| Intel Mac Pro was the last Apple offering with high end GPU
| capabilities. That's now a market segment they just aren't
| supporting at all. They didn't figure out how to do it
| compactly, they just abandoned it wholesale.
|
| Similarly if your use case depends on a whole lot of fast
| storage (eg, the 4x NVME to PCI-E x16 bifurcation boards),
| well that's also now something Apple just doesn't support.
| They didn't figure out something else. They didn't do super
| innovative engineering for it. They just walked away from
| those markets completely, which they're allowed to do of
| course. It's just not exactly inspiring or "deserves credit"
| worthy.
| Melatonic wrote:
| You could argue they abandoned that market long before
| (around the era of the mac pro trashcan). Along with the
| pro software.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| They can abandon it multiple times ;)
|
| When they introduced the cheese grater Mac Pro the new
| high end GPUs were a showcase feature of it. Complete
| with the bespoke "Duo" variants and the special power
| connector doohickey (MPX iirc?). So I'd consider that an
| attempt to re-enter that market at least.
| AJRF wrote:
| > Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for
| home inference machines
|
| Apple are winning a small battle for a market that they aren't
| very good in. If you compare the performance of a 3090 and
| above vs any Apple hardware you would be insane to go with the
| Apple hardware.
|
| When I hear someone say this it's akin to hearing someone say
| Macs are good for gaming. It's such a whiplash from what I know
| to be reality.
|
| Or another jarring statement - Sam Altman saying Mario has an
| amazing story in that interview with Elon Musk. Mario has
| basically the minimum possible story to get you to move the
| analogue sticks. Few games have less story than Mario. Yet Sam
| called it amazing.
|
| It's a statement from someone who just doesn't even understand
| the first thing about what they are talking about.
|
| Sorry for the mini rant. I just keep hearing this apple thing
| over and over and it's nonsense.
| alberth wrote:
| Just a reminder that the old Intel Mac Pro could handle 1.5TB
| of RAM ... today's Mac Studio can only handle 0.25TB.
|
| Seem odd that a computer from a decade ago could have more than
| a 1TB of _incremental_ RAM vs what we can buy today from Apple.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| The M5 Ultra Studio may support more as it becomes a
| replacement for the Mac Pro.
| utopiah wrote:
| > ...making the perfect hardware for home inference machines.
|
| I really don't get why anybody would want that. What's the use
| case there?
|
| If someone doesn't care about privacy, they can use for-profit
| services because they are basically losing money, trying to
| corner the market.
|
| If they care about privacy, they can rent cloud instances in
| order to setup, run, close and it will be both cheaper, faster
| (if they can afford it) but also with no upfront cost per
| project. This can be done with a lot of scaffolding, e.g.
| Mistral, HuggingFace, or not, e.g. AWS/Azure/GoogleCloud, etc.
| The point being that you do NOT purchase the GPU or even
| dedicated hardware, e.g. Google TPU, but rather rent for what
| you actually need and when the next gen is up, you're not stuck
| with "old" gen.
|
| So... what use case if left, somebody who is both technical,
| very privacy conscious AND want to do so offline despite have
| 5G or satellite connectivity pretty much anywhere?
|
| I honestly don't get who that's for (and I did try a dozens of
| local models, so I'm actually curious).
|
| PS: FWIW https://pricepertoken.com might help but not sure it
| shows the infrastructure each rely on to compare. If you have a
| better link please share back.
| pwython wrote:
| Genuine question: If I were to fine-tune a model with 10
| years of business data in a competitive space, would you feel
| safe with cloud training?
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| If you already have those 10 years of bussiness data on
| Microsoft or Google services or their respective clouds,
| are you feeling safe?
| justinhj wrote:
| People store that data in databases in the same data centre
| so it's really the same level of trust needed that your
| provider adheres to the no training on your data. Trust and
| lawyers.
| utopiah wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer but technically most if not all cloud
| providers, specific to AI ("neo-cloud") or not, to provide
| Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) as someone else
| pointed out.
|
| That being said if I were to be in such a situation, and if
| somehow the guarantees wouldn't be enough then I'd
| definitely expect to have the budget to build my own data
| center with GB300 or TPUs. I can't imagine that running it
| on a Mac Studio.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > If they care about privacy, they can rent cloud instances
| in order to setup, run, close and it will be both cheaper,
| faster (if they can afford it) but also with no upfront cost
| per project. This can be done with a lot of scaffolding, e.g.
| Mistral, HuggingFace, or not, e.g. AWS/Azure/GoogleCloud,
| etc.
|
| I'm a somewhat tech heavy guy (compiles my own kernel, uses
| online hosting, etc).
|
| Reading your comment doesn't sound appealing at all. I do
| almost no cloud stuff. I don't know which provider to choose.
| I have to compare costs. How can I trust they won't peek at
| my data (no, a Privacy Policy is not enough - I'd need
| encryption with only me having the key). What do I do if they
| suddenly jack up the rates or go out of business? I suddenly
| need a backup strategy as well. And repeat the whole painful
| loop.
|
| I'll lose a _lot_ more time figuring this out than with a Mac
| Studio. I 'll probably lose money too. I'll rent from one
| provider, get stuck, and having a busy life, sit on it a
| month or two before I find a fix (paying money for nothing).
| At least if I use the Mac Studio as my primary machine, I
| don't have to worry about money going to waste because I'm
| actually utilizing it.
|
| And chances are, a lot of the data I'll use it with (e.g.
| mail) is sitting on the same machine anyway. Getting
| something on the cloud to work with it is yet-another-pain.
| eitally wrote:
| To your second issue/question, all the cloud provide CMEK
| services/features (for many years now).
| utopiah wrote:
| > suddenly jack up the rates or go out of business?
|
| There is basically no lock-in, you don't even "move" your
| image, your data is basically some "context" or a history
| of prompts which probably fits in a floppy disk (not even
| being sarcastic) so if you know the basic about
| containerization (Docker, podman, etc) which most likely
| the cloud provider even takes care of, then it takes
| literally minutes to switch from one to another. It's
| really not more complex that setting up a PHP server, the
| only difference is the hardware you run on and that's
| basically a dropdown button on a Web interface (if you
| don't want to have scripts for that too) then selecting the
| right image (basically NVIDIA support).
|
| Consequently even if that were to happen (which I have
| NEVER seen! at worst it's like 15% increase after years)
| then it would actually not matter to you. It's also very
| unlikely to happen based of the investment poured into the
| "industry". Basically everybody is trying to get "you" as a
| customer to rely on their stack.
|
| ... but OK, let's imagine that's not appealing to you, have
| you not done the comparison of what a Mac Studio (or
| whatever hardware) could actually buy otherwise?
| BeetleB wrote:
| Ok. I think I misunderstood. So the idea is to simple set
| up the LLM service on the server and access it with an
| API like I would with any LLM provider? This way whatever
| application I want to use it for stays at home?
|
| That's a bit more appealing. How much would it cost per
| month to have it continually online?
| utopiah wrote:
| Well it depends entirely on what you need. You can even
| do the training yourself on that infrastructure to rent
| if you want. The more you do yourself, the more private
| but also the more expensive it will be.
|
| I don't want to make an ad here but I'm going to point to
| HuggingFace https://endpoints.huggingface.co (and to
| avoid singling them out just
| https://replicate.com/pricing too but I don't know them
| well) as an example with pricing.
|
| The "beauty" IMHO of such solutions is that again you pay
| for what you want. If you want to use the endpoint only
| for 5min to test that the model and its API fits your
| need? OK. You want the whole month? Sure. You want 1
| user, namely you? Fine, not a lot of power, you want your
| whole organization to use that endpoint? Scale up.
|
| I'm going to give very rough approximation because
| honestly I'm not really into this so someone please
| adjust with source :
|
| Apple Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB = $4K
|
| ~NVIDIA A100 with 80G ~ 10x perf compared to M3 Pro
| (obviously depends on models)
|
| So on Replicate today a one can get an A100 for ~$5/hr
| which is ... about a month. But that's for 10x speed and
| electricity included. So very VERY approximately if you
| use a Mac Studio for 10 months on AI non stop (days and
| night) then it's arguably worth it.
|
| If you use it less, say 2hrs/day only for inference, then
| I imagine it takes few years to have the equivalent and
| by that time I bet Replicate or HuggingFace is going to
| rent much faster setup for much cheaper simply because
| that's what they have ALL done for the last few years.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Well, full disclosure (despite my comments above): I'm
| not interested in buying a Mac Studio. I was merely
| explaining why I thought people may prefer it.
|
| For my own use, I'm just looking at absolute price (and
| convenience).
|
| I haven't explored open weights models, so I have no idea
| which I'd want. It would be great to get a "frontier"
| model like Minimax-M2.5, but at $10/hr, it's not worth it
| - let alone $40/hr for GLM-5. I'd have to explore use
| cases for cheaper models. Likely for things related to
| reading emails, I can get by with a much cheaper model.
|
| If I set one of these up, how easily is it for me to
| launch one of these (on the command line on my home PC)
| and then shut it down. Right now, when I write any app
| (or use OpenCode), it's frictionless. My worry is that
| either turning it on will be a hassle, and even worse,
| I'll forget to turn it off and suddenly get a big
| pointless bill.
|
| If there are any guides out there on how people manage
| all this, it would be much appreciated.
| utopiah wrote:
| Honestly I doubt it's worth it, hence my suggestion to
| make a "cold" estimation of both options.
|
| Well it's not exactly a guide and honestly it's quite
| outdated (because I stop keeping track as I just don't
| get the quality of results I hope for versus huge trade
| offs that aren't worth it for me) but I listed plenty of
| models and software solutions for self-hosting, at home
| or in the cloud at https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/Self
| HostingArtificialIntel...
|
| Feels free to check it out and if there is something I
| can clarify, happy to try.
| jedberg wrote:
| I think the main use case is home automation. You don't want
| details of your home setup leaking out.
| dabockster wrote:
| CUDA 13 on Linux solves the unified memory problem via HMM and
| llamacpp. It's an absolute pain to get running without
| disabling Secure Boot, but that should be remedied literally
| next month with the release of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Canonical is
| incorporating signed versions of both the new Nvidia open
| driver and CUDA into its own repo system, so look out for that.
| Signed Nvidia modules do already exist right now for RHEL and
| AlmaLinux, but those aren't exactly the best desktop OSes.
|
| But yeah, right now Apple actually has price <-> performance
| captured a lot of you're buying a new computer just in general.
| zadikian wrote:
| What part of your workflow relies on home LLM inference?
| alerighi wrote:
| To me there is a fundamental difference. Even if PC hardware
| costs slightly more (now because of the RAM situation, Apple
| producing his chips in house can get better deals of course),
| it's something that is worth more investing in in.
|
| Maybe you spend 1000$ more for a PC of comparable performance,
| well tomorrow you need more power, change or add another GPU,
| add more RAM, add another SSD. A workstation you can keep
| upgrade it for years, adding a small cost for an upgrade in
| performance.
|
| An Apple machine is basically throw away: no component inside
| can be upgraded, you need more RAM? Throw it away and buy a new
| one. You want a new GPU technology? You have to change the
| whole thing. And if something inside breaks? You of course
| throw away the whole computer since everything is soldered on
| the mainboard.
|
| There is then the software issue, with Apple devices you are
| forced to use macOS that kind of sucks, especially for a server
| usage. True nowadays you can install Linux on it, but the GPU
| it's not that well supported, thus you loose all the benefits.
| You have to stuck with an OS that sucks, while in the PC market
| you have plenty of OS choices, Windows, a million of Linux
| distributions, etc. If I need a workstation to train LLM why do
| I care about a OS with a GUI? It's only a waste of resources, I
| just need a thing that runs Linux and I can SSH into it. Also I
| don't get the benefit of using containers, Docker, etc.
|
| Mac suck even hardware side form a server point of view, for
| example it's not possible to rack mount them, it's not possible
| to have redundant PSU, key don't offer remote KVM capability,
| etc.
| mjburgess wrote:
| "Upgrades" havent been a thing for nearly a decade. By the
| time you want to upgrade a machine part (c. 5yr+ for modern
| machines), you'd want to upgrade every thing, and its cheap
| to do so.
|
| It isnt 2005 any more where RAM/CPU/etc. progress benefits
| from upgrading every 6mo. It's closer to 6yr to really notice
| bigyabai wrote:
| That's news to me. I see Mac Minis with external drives
| plugged-in constantly; I bet those people would appreciate
| user-servicable storage. I doubt they bought an external
| drive because they wanted to throw away the whole computer.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| External drive is workaround to apple's pricing scheme,
| often purchased at same time as computer.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Mac minis have user serviceable storage:
| https://store.m4-ssd.com/products/third-party-ssd-for-
| mac-mi...
| cesarb wrote:
| > By the time you want to upgrade a machine part (c. 5yr+
| for modern machines), you'd want to upgrade every thing,
|
| That's only the case for CPU/MB/RAM, because the interfaces
| are tightly coupled (you want to upgrade your CPU, but the
| new one uses an AM5 socket so you need to upgrade the
| motherboard, which only works with DDR5 so you need to
| upgrade your RAM). For other parts, a "Ship of Theseus"
| approach is often worth it: you don't need to replace your
| 2TB NVMe M.2 storage just because you wanted a faster CPU,
| you can keep the same GPU since it's all PCIe, and the SATA
| DVD drive you've carried over since the early 2000s still
| works the same.
| secabeen wrote:
| Even this is understating it; if you buy at the right
| point in the cycle, you can Ship-of-Theseus quite a
| while. An AM4 motherboard released in Feb 2017 with a
| Ryzen 1600X CPU, DDR4 memory and a GTX780 Ti would be a
| obsolete system by today's standards. Yet, that AM4
| motherboard can be upgraded to run a Ryzen 5800X3D CPU,
| the same (or faster) DDR4 memory, and a RTX 5070Ti GPU
| and be very competitive with mid-tier 2026 systems
| containing all new components. Throughout all this, the
| case, PSU, cooling solution, storage could all be
| maintained, and only replaced when individual components
| fail.
|
| I expect many users would be happy with the above final
| state through 2030, when the AM6 socket releases. That
| would be 13 years of service for that original
| motherboard, memory, case and ancillary components. This
| is an extreme case, you have to time the initial purchase
| perfectly, but it is possible.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| You can keep CPU and RAM for way longer than the GPU if you
| game...
|
| Your point kind of disproves your point.
| mjburgess wrote:
| https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/
| bigyabai wrote:
| Case in point. Most popular cards are discrete GPUs that
| can be upgraded.
| caycep wrote:
| >>Mac suck even hardware side form a server point of view,
| for example it's not possible to rack mount them, it's not
| possible to have redundant PSU, key don't offer remote KVM
| capability, etc.
|
| https://atp.fm/683
| appletrotter wrote:
| > You have to stuck with an OS that sucks, while in the PC
| market you have plenty of OS choices, Windows, a million of
| Linux distributions
|
| Windows is 10x more enshittified than OSX
|
| > An Apple machine is basically throw away: no component
| inside can be upgraded, you need more RAM? Throw it away and
| buy a new one.
|
| Tell that to all the people rocking 5-10 year old macbook
| that still run great
| orangecat wrote:
| _you need more RAM? Throw it away and buy a new one._
|
| Or sell it, which is much easier to do with Macs because
| they're known quantities and not "Acer Onyx X321 Q-series
| Ultra".
|
| _There is then the software issue, with Apple devices you
| are forced to use macOS that kind of sucks, especially for a
| server usage_
|
| That's a fair point. Apple would get a ton of goodwill if
| they released enough documentation to let Asahi keep up with
| new hardware. I can't imagine it would harm their ecosystem;
| the people who would actually run Linux are either not using
| Macs at all, or users like me who treat them as Unix
| workstations and ignore their lock-in attempts.
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| As others have said, that's just not the reality of a modern
| work machine. If I need a new GPU or more RAM, I'm positive I
| need everything else upgraded too
| infecto wrote:
| I think most of that is really opinion and experiences. No
| doubt it's not designed or built truly for racks but folks
| have been making rack mounts for Mac minis since they first
| came out.
|
| On the upgrade path I don't think upgrades are truly a thing
| these days. Aside from storage for most components by the
| time you get to whatever your next cycle is, it's usually
| best/easiest to refresh the whole system unless you
| underbought the first time around.
| gk-- wrote:
| > with Apple devices you are forced to use macOS that kind of
| sucks, especially for a server usage
|
| you can just install linux?
| rantingdemon wrote:
| Only really possible with the M1. If referring to Asahi.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Apple abandoned the pro market long before ever releasing the
| current iteration of Mac Pro. I doubt they care about getting
| it back considering its a smaller niche of consumers and
| probably significantly more investment on the software side.
|
| At best we probably get a chassis to awkwardly daisy chain a
| bunch of Mac Studios together
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I do love the Mac Studio. I had a 2019 Mac Pro, the Intel
| cheesegrater, but my home office upstairs became unpleasant
| with it pushing out 300W+. I replaced it with the M2 Ultra
| Studio for a fraction of the heat output (though I did had to
| buy an OWC 4xNVMe bay).
|
| > I bet there's gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in
| June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware
| for home inference machines.
|
| This I'm not actually as sure about. The current Studio
| offerings have done away with the 512GB memory option. I
| understand the RAM situation, but they didn't change pricing
| they just discontinued it. So I'm curious to see what the next
| Studio is like. I'd almost love to see a Studio with even one
| PCI slot, make it a bit taller, have a slide out cover...
| hulitu wrote:
| > Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
|
| They replaced it with Mac Neo. Did you notice the wonderful build
| quality, the accesible price and that everyone is buying it ? And
| it has USB: U from universal.
| mrkpdl wrote:
| The 2019 Mac Pro's main purpose was to provide much needed
| reassurance that Apple cared about the Mac. In prior years the
| quality of the Macs had fallen over all product lines. And the
| question of does Apple care about the Mac at all was a legitimate
| one.
|
| This Mac Pro was about resetting and giving a clear signal that
| Apple was willing to invest in the Mac far more than it was about
| 'slots'.
|
| Today, Mac hardware is the best it has ever been, and no one is
| reasonably questioning apple's commitment to a Mac hardware.
|
| So it makes sense for the Mac Pro to make a graceful exit.
| hbn wrote:
| The hardware teams have done a great job proving Apple cares
| about the Mac.
|
| It'd be nice if the people in charge of the software would get
| the message.
| karel-3d wrote:
| They also discontinued the 1000 dollars Pro Stand, apparently
| karel-3d wrote:
| oh and those wheels
| zer0zzz wrote:
| It is kind of a bummer they never supported Cuda/HIP GPGPU using
| those slots.
| looopTools wrote:
| This honestly saddens me a little. From the PowerMac's to the
| MacPro I always loved them when having the opportunity to work
| with them. Plus I loved the expandability they offered.
|
| I don't find the external GPU houses for Mac Studio as appealing
| to use.
| bombcar wrote:
| They were a great aspirational product in the "when I win the
| lottery" category.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Sad. I had this pipe dream of an Apple Silicon system made as a
| PCIe endpoint, so a Mac Pro could be a coordinator and host to
| like 4 of such systems in a cluster with very fast interconnect.
| Imagine the possibilities.
| lwhi wrote:
| Apple need to sort out their software.
|
| Mac OS is a horrible experience.
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| Have you seen windows lately?
|
| (but yes, Apple seems happy to ship buggy software these days)
| lwhi wrote:
| Sure, Windows is awful, but that's no reason to ship terrible
| software.
|
| Apple's hardware is great, but without choice of software,
| they need to provide an amazing default option.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Damn I was hoping they would build proper GPUs at some point.
| shevy-java wrote:
| > It has gone without an update since then, languishing at its
| $6,999 price point
|
| What I find fascinating is how people pay so much for Apple-
| related products. Perhaps the quality requires a premium (I don't
| share that opinion, but for the sake of thinking, let's have it
| as an option here), but this seems more deliberate milking by
| Apple with such price tags. People must love being milked it
| seems.
| _ph_ wrote:
| The latest Mac Pro really didn't make much use of its size, as
| there were too few useful things to put into. Especially as the
| GPU is now part of the package anyway. Also, the Mac Studio is
| the perfect workstation for the desk.
|
| Still, there are a few things which could be improved relative to
| the current Studio. First, the ability to easily clean the
| internals from dust. You should be able to just lift the lid and
| clean the computer. Also, it would be great to have one Mac which
| you could just plug in a bunch of NVMe disks.
|
| On the other side, they might replace the Mac Pro with a rack
| mountable machine as the demand for ARM servers in the cloud
| raises.
| SwtCyber wrote:
| Studio for desks, something rackable for scale
| sylens wrote:
| A Mac Pro without external GPU support was always a dumb idea.
| They just made this to shut up the hard core fans who were
| complaining about the outdated Mac Pro in 2018.
| andrewl-hn wrote:
| This would probably push some high-end audio professionals away
| from Logic. One of the niches Mac Pro has been popular is audio
| production. And with cheesegrader the ability to slot in many-
| many different audio interfaces into a box instead of dangling
| out to various PCIe enclosures has been a big win.
|
| Here's a good video how it looks like:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I&list=PLi2i2YhL6o...
| (at 1:40 Neil Parfitt shows Mac audio setup his before and
| after).
| audunw wrote:
| Feels like it'd just create a market for a big rack-mountable
| multi-bay PCIe enclosure, with its own internal power supply,
| that you could connect with one ore more thunderbolt cable. I
| don't see any reason why a solution built around a Mac Studio
| should have to be significantly more cluttered.
|
| I don't know if such a solution exists right now, but I'm
| thinking there's a fair chance it will soon as the Mac Pro
| disappearing creates a demand for something like it.
| bitbckt wrote:
| The DAD AX32/AX64 is such a thing.
| dabockster wrote:
| Thunderbolt is really an unsung hero here. It is surprisingly
| nice to be able to move various components around my desk
| that would have otherwise sat in a huge tower hogging all the
| PCIe slots they can find.
| randusername wrote:
| Agreed, I've been doing experiments and it's wild to me
| what "just works" in a secondhand eGPU case or music
| production PCIe boxes.
|
| Dual 10G NIC cards, way cheaper than a comparable dongle 36
| HDDs in JBOD, absolutely! 12 optical drives, sure!
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The Thunderbolt offerings on the current Mac lineup offer
| _dramatically_ less bandwidth in total if that matters for a
| given use case. Thunderbolt 5 is the equivalent of PCI-E Gen
| 4 x4. So if all 4 of the Thunderbolt 5 ports on a Mac Studio
| can run at full speed, that 's still only the equivalent of a
| single gen 4 x16 slot. That's less than half the bandwidth of
| a basic consumer x86 CPU, to say nothing of the Xeon that was
| in the previous Intel Mac Pro or a modern Epyc/Threadripper
| (Pro).
|
| This is a big reason why things like eGPUs kinda suck.
| Thunderbolt is fast for external I/O, but it's quite pathetic
| compared to internal PCI-E.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Reports as pointed out here have shown that x4 to x16 for
| most GPUs and common loads is a 1% to 10% loss of
| performance - hardly pathetic. In many (gaming) cases, it
| would be unnoticeable.
| raydev wrote:
| The video you linked is from 2019. A lot has changed with
| Thunderbolt capability and the Studios now have enough
| ports/bandwidth to handle audio processing needs to multiple
| boxes.
| Simulacra wrote:
| I may be in the minority but I liked the cheese grater, it was a
| machine I could upgrade and use as a powerful workstation. The
| trashcan really turned me off of the Mac Pro series. I think
| Apple really missed an opportunity here, but hope Springs
| eternal.
| stephen_g wrote:
| I never understood the point of the Mac Pro for the last decade
| or so - especially after the Mac Studio was released, Apple
| should have worked out what professionals actually want -
| basically a Mac Studio but with three or four PCIe slots and a
| few SSD slots. That's literally all it should be!
|
| The Mac Pro was at the same time bizarrely over the top while
| also weirdly limited in some ways - while also being way to
| expensive...
| BillinghamJ wrote:
| Isn't that... exactly what the Mac Pro was? PCIe support was
| the primary point
| stephen_g wrote:
| What I'm trying to say is that with 7 slots and being more
| than double the size that it needed to be, it was way more
| machine than 95% of the market who might actually want it
| would buy, with a price that was correspondingly way too
| expensive...
| abmmgb wrote:
| It seems they are consolidating their proposition and slimming
| down their pipelines, not a bad thing
| SwtCyber wrote:
| It totally makes sense. Mac Studio basically ate the Mac Pro's
| lunch. But it's still kind of sad. The Mac Pro used to represent
| this idea that Apple cared about the absolute high-end, no-
| compromises workstation crowd
| m132 wrote:
| Yup, exactly my thoughts.
|
| To me, this discontinuation is less about the product and more
| about making a statement. The M2 Mac Pro was a dysfunctional
| product of an internal conflict of interests, but it cast a ray
| of hope that the M series would develop past the current
| scaled-up-but-still-disposable phone/embedded SoCs and that
| Apple had some interest in bringing them closer to the
| offerings of the competitors from the workstation/server
| market. Now, with this move, they've made it clear that they
| would rather give up an entire segment than make at least a
| narrow part of their ecosystem open enough for the PCIe slots
| of the Mac Pro to find any serious use.
| timnetworks wrote:
| Of course it's Made on iPhone! They stopped making anything else!
| razkaplan wrote:
| My autonomous YouTube show picked this up for today's rabbit hole
| episode -- worth watching:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g89_Me4iAi4
| BewareTheYiga wrote:
| I am incredibly saddened that the inevitable finally happened.
| The OG 5,1 cheese grater sparked so much joy. I added and
| expanded so much over the years before I finally donated it to a
| computer museum and moved on to Apple Silicon. I did everything
| from scientific computing, ripping movies, serving files, running
| websites, and everything in between.
| dhruv3006 wrote:
| I think they have something packing.
| ge96 wrote:
| I still remember that $1,000 for a wheel or maybe it was for all
| 4
| arvinsim wrote:
| The Mac Pro would have been much more popular if MacOS was still
| compatible with Nvidia GPUs.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-27 23:01 UTC)