So...Who Ordered a New Mac Pro? | MacRumors Forums
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Who ordered the new Mac Pro?
-
I ordered New Mac Pro
Votes: 7
6.7%
-
I ordered a Mac Studio Instead
Votes: 10
9.6%
-
I did not Order a New System
Votes: 87
83.7%
Total voters
I am a current owner of the 7.1 Mac Pro which I am still keeping and using, but I ordered a Mac Studio.
I was *This* close to ordering the new Mac Pro, but after seeing it's the exact same thing as the Mac Studio aside from the PCIe slots, I decided against it for the extra 3k.
If it had just like one more key point as a difference to the Mac Studio, I would have considered it more.
If I didn't already have a 7.1, I may have ordered the Mac Pro - just because I think the design and case are amazing, and I can make some use of the PCIe slots.
Pegasus R4i is an MPX module, so not supported on the new Mac Pro, which is a bit of a head scratcher imo. MPX was such an expensive and short lived adventure..
flat4
Contributor
Nvidia GPUs and Windows doesn't seem to be happening with Macs anymore so the 7,1 will be the last tower desktop from Apple for me.
I would consider a Mac studio or macbook in the future though.
I feel for those who need PCIe though. It feels like Apple rushed a new Mac Pro just to complete the ASi transition.
singhs.apps
macrumors 6502a
I would have gotten the studio if I hadn’t upgraded my PC workstation 8 months back.
Right now Mac chores are via a maxed out M1 Max MBP.
Future ?
Mac Pro only if it has extreme chips, better than 5090 or above GPU performance + discreet GPUs as expansion modules + 384 and above ram.
Else a M3/M4 ultra studio.
Or maybe not even that and call it a day from working in macOS.
m1maverick
macrumors 65816
PowerMike G5
macrumors 6502a
It'd be a touch decision. I just wish there was more differentiation between the 8,1 and the studio. I guess I'll see how I feel when the 9,1 comes out. With AS, I do think there will be a more frequent cadence of updates at least.
MisterAndrew
macrumors 68030
prefuse07
macrumors 6502a
In other words, they purposefully handicapped it, to make it easy for them to justify scrapping it.
That leaves us with a pretty grim outlook, no?
What do you guys think?
Very possible.One thing I wonder though -- if the 8,1 has really low sales numbers.... Will Apple just say "see look, nobody wants it" and scrap the product line altogether?
With the feeling that maybe development had a lot of issues - maybe they know it has issues and this is a stop gap. Maybe they're planning on fixing this with the next Mac Pro.
Or maybe this is going to be what it is, and it gets cut.
At least it shares its guts with the Mac Studio so it's probably not that expensive to design a new one. Just update the SOC, maybe the board, and you can keep going for a while.
deconstruct60
macrumors G4
The MPX was an expensive adventure for customers or Apple? For Apple, the MPX connector ( in an of itself) probably was not relatively expensive at all (**) . Apple had jump some hoops to route mulitple Display Port streams through a switch and hither-and-yon all over the logic board to remote ports. But that became a solution in search of a problem when just move the Thunderbolt controllers onto the main die. Even Intel moved TB controllers onto the main die in the laptop models in 2020 before Apple even launched M1.Pegasus R4i is an MPX module, so not supported on the new Mac Pro, which is a bit of a head scratcher imo. MPX was such an expensive and short lived adventure..
The R4i is a rather poor justification for the MPX connector. It doesn't use 3/4 of the connector pins present. It also likely doesn't use anywhere remotely near 150W let alone the full budget of the connector power. Unless had some older , power hungry 3.5 HDDs , 75W is a decent budget to run four drives and a small embedded controller SoC with some RAM. 75W comes off the basic bus for PCI-e. And the R4i soaking up the x16 PCI-e v3 bandwidth for just 4 HDD disk drives ... another gross waste of potential resources.
The J2i product worked fine with a couple of cables. It also was 'cloned' as a product by multiple folks. For example,
Fusion Flex J3i (2019 Mac Pro Drive Bracket) - SONNETTECH
www.sonnettech.com
The R4i was cloned ( best I can find) by NOBODY. Relatively extremely straight forward engineering changes could have turned it into a 6-pin + bus , or maybe bus only, powered card with no real material differences in feature set. The R4i 'smells' a lot like the LG UltraFine 21.5"/27" products. Apple kind-of-sort-want wanted something but didn't want to make it themselves. So they go to a vendor and to some "back seat driving" of the specs. ( "make a monitor with one and only one input, no buttons , etc. ... Yeah nothing like the other stuff you sell." "Make a huge card that takes four 3.5 drives with now wires for power. Yeah, nothing like the other stuff you sell at all") . In exchange for the pushing the constraints on the design, Apple promises to buy a sizable block of product ( should help mostly/partial pay for R&D indirectly ) and vendor gets "most favored " status on the Apple Store. Lots of exposure in tech docs and sales material and Apple Salesfolks training sessions.
[ Note: nobody every cloned the LG UltraFines either with Apple's imposed design constraints. ]
The R4i was deeply born out of the Power Mac G5 and the carry over of the 4 drive bays (and a bit of Apple "real" RAID card). Apple felts they couldn't dislodge some folks from their 2008-2012 models unless the customers could pull those 4 HDDs in the trays and move them over.
The Pegasus M4 ( now R4 ) works across the whole Mac line up and isn't materially slower at all. Hence the R4i is 'covered' in at least two directions by just Promise products. J2i is way more affordable. M4 is way more flexible.
Throw in modern PCI-e cards with multiple U.2 or M.2 SSDs. deliberate large SSD cards. Upcoming E1/E3 EDSFF drives. etc.
** ASUS whipped together their own power only , "look ma no wires" connector for GPUs.
Asus Demos RTX 4070 GPU With No Power Connectors on BTF Motherboard
www.tomshardware.com
Wishful thinking is my thought on this.Very possible.
With the feeling that maybe development had a lot of issues - maybe they know it has issues and this is a stop gap. Maybe they're planning on fixing this with the next Mac Pro.
Or maybe this is going to be what it is, and it gets cut.
At least it shares its guts with the Mac Studio so it's probably not that expensive to design a new one. Just update the SOC, maybe the board, and you can keep going for a while.
Mac Pro is dead or you won’t see a new one for 3 years whilst the studio gets an annual update.
They probably released this latest model just because they said they would and didn’t want to back track.
deconstruct60
macrumors G4
Depends upon if Apple had intended to put a "bigger than Ultra" SoC in the system , but that fumbled that due to design problems.One thing I wonder though -- if the 8,1 has really low sales numbers.... Will Apple just say "see look, nobody wants it" and scrap the product line altogether?
May get a 'let's fix that with more deliberate chiplet design so it is actually cost effective" and they'll try again.
Apple has gone MP 2013 --> iMac Pro --> Mac Studio. All iterating around the same basic constraints of :
i. literal desktop in a 7" x 7" fooprint ( or less)
ii. 400-500W power budget
iii. limited modularity.
If the original 2019 plan was 'stop at Ultra" and the "bigger than Ultra" was only an internal crazy 'side' experiment then, yeah whatever happens in next 12-18 months probably determines fate. There is a couple of things that indicate that wasn't the plan.
a. the leak covered in the thread of "40 core ASI just around the corner". There were 40 core systems floating around. It just wasn't viable in the M1 and M2 forms they had choosen.
b. Apple ripped out 3 of the 4 8-pin AUX power connectors. Again pretty big indication that the CPU 'zone' was suppose to soak up lots more power than just a plain old Ultra. ( 300-400W range rather than about half of that. )
Apple also keep the 1400W power supply.
Extremely doubtful they skipped the 40 core version just to purposefully handicap it. More likely that SoC just didn't work right ( on some technical and economical reasons). Apple wanted to do the AirPower 3 device wireless charger... it just didn't work right. The 40 core version appears to have died before they got on stage and made a big deal about it ( like the normal Apple R&D secretive process).In other words, they purposefully handicapped it, to make it easy for them to justify scrapping it.
The move in 2019 to crank up the entry price 100% to $6K probably had some notion of needing to 'reseat' the core target market in the Apple Silicon era. ( Intel and AMD components would drop out , but the SoC replacing them wouldn't be 'cheap'. ). Apple isn't looking to keep 100% of the old user base. They just new a large enough new set of customers ( a mix of some old Mac Pro users and some new folks ).
For those looking for an HP/Dell/Lenovo clone that 'check boxes' all the features of those system with maximum modularity, it has been grim. Wasn't going to happen. The vast bulk of the Xeon W-3000/2000 R&D is all paid for by the Intel server business. Apple had to invent the MPX connector largely because there was no GPU in the CPU die. To leave that GPU-less was not Apple's call at all. It was the 'work around' that had to do because Intel made the call on the CPU package design.That leaves us with a pretty grim outlook, no?
There are some bandwidth throughput speed bumps coming to LDDR5/6 over next year or two that could allow Apple to put ECC coverage into their "poor man's" HBM implementation without a noticeable drop off in end-user visible throughput. TSMC N3 means they need to redesign the Max die anyway. There should be a decent track record if the Studio can support > 1M sales or not.
Four very large , oddly shaped monolithic deals isn't a good chiplet design. If Apple stops trying to hammer a round peg in a square hole and possibly drop down to just 3 side-by-side compute chiplets with I/O on either side that would probably work much better and be less expensive. ( just have decouple the Studio from slavishly using laptop chips. ) . But they'll need to spread that 'desktop oriented' chiplet solution over more products than the Mac Pro. Without expanding into the Studio sales it likely won't work economically.
The Extreme is starting to look more and more like "A Bridge Too Far". Apple got wound up trying to do the biggest possible thing ( "biggest airdrop ever . ..more audacious broad front ever ... fastest charge up a two lane road ever ... ) as oppose to the more tactically sound thing.
As for the fact that Mac Pro isn't backordered by months ( like launch of 2013 and 2019 ). The MBP 15" and Mac Studio are not either. Some of this is Apple getting the demand forecast 'right' . Some of this is macroeconomic conditions of lots of folks just not throwing money at tech like drunken sailors in a strip club.What do you guys think?
Some of this "it is going to fail" is folks projecting "If Apple doesn't make exactly what I want then it should fail". That is likely wrong. ( heard similar stuff when Apple shifted away from XServe. )
deconstruct60
macrumors G4
This is key factor. If it is what is the cheapest possible path to the absolute fattest margins then they solely stay stuck on leveraging monolithic laptop dies that pay for themselves with other products ( Max MPB 14"/16"/Studio pay for the dies and only then looking for cheapest alternative augment. )At least it shares its guts with the Mac Studio so it's probably not that expensive to design a new one. Just update the SOC, maybe the board, and you can keep going for a while.
No real chiplets ... just cheapest kludge possible. But honestly I think the Studio is long term 'not so great' shape in that context too. Eventually after a few iterations just doing a plain Max and dropping the Ultra is cheaper too.
The could Scrooge McDuck their way all the way out of a upper end desktop line up. Just sell headless laptops.
You’ll be waiting a while probably.i'm waiting until the 7,1 is at 3,1 prices
2023 MP might be the last one and maybe Apple will just kill the desktop computer business off completely and everyone can use mega-powered iPads.
Make it look fancy, make people throw it out and buy new one if they need to upgrade.
I’m holding on to the 7,1 and will upgrade it to the maximum.
I am using the R4i right now, and I like it overall. It is a little noisy, but otherwise it allows me to have a large amount of relatively fast storage within the Mac Pro itself, minimizing clutter outside.The MPX was an expensive adventure for customers or Apple? For Apple, the MPX connector ( in an of itself) probably was not relatively expensive at all (**) . Apple had jump some hoops to route mulitple Display Port streams through a switch and hither-and-yon all over the logic board to remote ports. But that became a solution in search of a problem when just move the Thunderbolt controllers onto the main die. Even Intel moved TB controllers onto the main die in the laptop models in 2020 before Apple even launched M1.
The R4i is a rather poor justification for the MPX connector. It doesn't use 3/4 of the connector pins present. It also likely doesn't use anywhere remotely near 150W let alone the full budget of the connector power. Unless had some older , power hungry 3.5 HDDs , 75W is a decent budget to run four drives and a small embedded controller SoC with some RAM. 75W comes off the basic bus for PCI-e. And the R4i soaking up the x16 PCI-e v3 bandwidth for just 4 HDD disk drives ... another gross waste of potential resources.
The J2i product worked fine with a couple of cables. It also was 'cloned' as a product by multiple folks. For example,[ Folks who just wanted an internal "Time Machine Drive" ... the J2i worked fine. Apple made "internal TM" popular on previous Mac Pro's so there was demand that pulled in solutions from multiple vendors. ]Fusion Flex J3i (2019 Mac Pro Drive Bracket) - SONNETTECH
3-drive mounting system for Mac Pro (2019). Install SATA 3.5-inch hard drives and 2.5-inch SSDs. Kit includes brackets, screws, and cables.www.sonnettech.com
The R4i was cloned ( best I can find) by NOBODY. Relatively extremely straight forward engineering changes could have turned it into a 6-pin + bus , or maybe bus only, powered card with no real material differences in feature set. The R4i 'smells' a lot like the LG UltraFine 21.5"/27" products. Apple kind-of-sort-want wanted something but didn't want to make it themselves. So they go to a vendor and to some "back seat driving" of the specs. ( "make a monitor with one and only one input, no buttons , etc. ... Yeah nothing like the other stuff you sell." "Make a huge card that takes four 3.5 drives with now wires for power. Yeah, nothing like the other stuff you sell at all") . In exchange for the pushing the constraints on the design, Apple promises to buy a sizable block of product ( should help mostly/partial pay for R&D indirectly ) and vendor gets "most favored " status on the Apple Store. Lots of exposure in tech docs and sales material and Apple Salesfolks training sessions.
[ Note: nobody every cloned the LG UltraFines either with Apple's imposed design constraints. ]
The R4i was deeply born out of the Power Mac G5 and the carry over of the 4 drive bays (and a bit of Apple "real" RAID card). Apple felts they couldn't dislodge some folks from their 2008-2012 models unless the customers could pull those 4 HDDs in the trays and move them over.
The Pegasus M4 ( now R4 ) works across the whole Mac line up and isn't materially slower at all. Hence the R4i is 'covered' in at least two directions by just Promise products. J2i is way more affordable. M4 is way more flexible.
Throw in modern PCI-e cards with multiple U.2 or M.2 SSDs. deliberate large SSD cards. Upcoming E1/E3 EDSFF drives. etc.
** ASUS whipped together their own power only , "look ma no wires" connector for GPUs.(possibly after the 16-pin drama broke out). Probably didn't have a ginormous R&D budget to do that.Asus Demos RTX 4070 GPU With No Power Connectors on BTF Motherboard
Replacing the 16-pin power connector with a proprietary slot.www.tomshardware.com
It does fit in nicely with the Mac Pro MPX modules - I just wish it was starting that could be passed along to the new Mac Pro, and sadly it can't because of the MPX design it seems.
Apple knows very well that copying another Mac's hardware with its restrictions and performance (and adding slots that are missing GPU support!) isn't going to make for an exciting product. But they surely had the plan for where the Mac Pro will be heading well before releasing it gimped like this.
If I were Apple, I'd be designing the next ASi iteration with an option for DDR5 memory slots in mind, and I'd offer an upgrade service where customers bring in their Mac Pro 2019/2023 in for a mainboard replacement and a yearly mainboard-replacement "upgrade" path is established.
I am convinced Apple won't ask us to replace the entire Mac Pro, and I am also convinced they'll extract as much money from their customers as possible, so offering that mainboard upgrade service makes perfect sense.
At that point the distinction between Studio and Pro will be clear: At the very least the Pro will support double the memory and more, and I assume there will be a chip beyond the Ultra that will be Pro exclusive. Since the naming scheme is already at a limit (what could be better than Ultra?) they'll call it something like P1 (performance) which allows for another Mac Pro exclusive series with varying performance from the P1 Pro/Max to the P1 Ultra.
And then instead of being forced to follow the yearly M release cycle -it would look silly if the Studio got the lastest M release and the Mac Pro didn't- they can establish a separate, for example 3 year cycle, so that they got a couple years in between Mac Pro releases.
Perhaps there won't be any user-upgradeable memory at all and the P1 will just double the max memory config from the Studio. I am hoping for more memory configs but 384GiB+ would at least be better than the measly 192GiB we get now.
What may happen is that people hang on to 7,1 as long as possible then swap to high spec PC workstations which can be upgraded to much more powerful levels than the new Mac Pro.Perhaps there won't be any user-upgradeable memory at all and the P1 will just double the max memory config from the Studio. I am hoping for more memory configs but 384GiB+ would at least be better than the measly 192GiB we get now.
The user base might leave Apple completely and they can just be left to make disposable laptops, phones and tablets.
rpmurray
macrumors 68020
MisterAndrew
macrumors 68030
I was thinking this too. Apple isn't dumb. They intentionally released a Mac Pro they know has the exact same capability as the Studio. They know there are very few people willing to spend $3k for PCIe slots. It could be to drive Studio sales because the overpriced Mac Pro makes the Studio look like an excellent deal.One thing I wonder though -- if the 8,1 has really low sales numbers.... Will Apple just say "see look, nobody wants it" and scrap the product line altogether?
In other words, they purposefully handicapped it, to make it easy for them to justify scrapping it.
That leaves us with a pretty grim outlook, no?
What do you guys think?
I find it hard to believe a company could be that stupid to spend $$$ to intentionally kill off a major product line and destroy its own reputation. Maybe I'm just not understanding the internal Apple religion.I was thinking this too. Apple isn't dumb. They intentionally released a Mac Pro they know has the exact same capability as the Studio. They know there are very few people willing to spend $3k for PCIe slots. It could be to drive Studio sales because the overpriced Mac Pro makes the Studio look like an excellent deal.
Grumply
macrumors 6502
PCIe expansion boxes generally have nasty cheap fans that make a racket. So it'll be much nice to have those peripherals tucked away inside the tower, and cooled calmly and quietly.
Matty_TypeR
macrumors 6502a
I dont see any advantage in buying into this new Mac pro to be out dated in 2 years time if not before. Its like a studio with PCIe for mass storage only.
I will update my 7.1 to 28 core when needed and add more Ram when needed, but will not buy into the closed in Mac eco system of the Mac pro 8.1 with just storage upgrade's available. And who's to say there wont be a TB-5 PCIe card available for the Mac pro 7.1 when its released. but i expect apple will block that like the 7900xtx update they could provide if they wanted to for existing Mac pro 7.1 owners who would like a 7900xtx.
I have the feeling that my next purchase will be a thread ripper based machine anyway, where i can use maybe a 5090 in 18 months time which will blow the M3 ultra away, ray tracing extreme performance awaits.
rpmurray
macrumors 68020
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