Just looking at the economics of the Mac Pro based on sales of the machine itself doesn't quite capture the full picture. An Apple Silicon Mac Pro could have many roles:
- A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be. This in turn could enhance the Apple / Mac brand for a certain group of users.
- An aspirational product for users who think that they might need more power in the future.
- A means of keeping companies that need a small number of powerful machines in the Apple camp.
- A proving ground for technology that ultimately makes its way into volume products.
All of these factors could make the product justify its development costs even if actual sales are small. I doubt that the highest end models of some premium car brands recoup their development costs but their value to the brand offsets those costs.
Yes, exactly. Add two more: a prestige product that motivates top talent, and senior management likes these products.
Halo cars like Corvette Z06 are exactly the right analogy. They sell at most 8000/year; there is no way it’s profitable as a line item. But it gets made for all of those indirect reasons.
> A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be.
The danger there is what if it isn't? Apple's riding high right now but what if AMD or Qualcomm or whoever takes the next crown? This is one of the things that almost killed the company back in the G4 days. Jobs would be up there on stage essentially lying to our faces about the "Personal Supercomputer" when any of us could look at the literally-twice-as-fast Coppermine boxes on our desks to see the truth.
Computers and technology are ephemeral and quirky. Apple's brand isn't and has never been[1] about selling "chips" or "computers". They sell "modes of interaction".
[1] The last pure-tech play from Apple was the Apple II+.
Hmmm, performance has been a key part of Apple’s branding for decades from Power PC (don’t disagree with your point on G4 though) through Intel in the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro and now on iPhones and M series Macs.
Edit - this is a comment about branding ie how Apple presents itself not actual performance.
"Apple is Dooomed!"
Google: 8,310,000 results in 0.38 seconds
NOBODY has transitioned to an other architecture like Apple has, nor has the industry been kicked in the shorts as many times as by apple. (wholesale inclusion of GPU in the OS, migration from Motorola, to Power PC, to Intel, to Arm to X Efficienty + Y Performance Cores...and nobody wrings as much out of the ARM architecture as Apple.
It's 'the same OS' from the watch, TV, Airpods to the Mac Pro.
There is no cost cutting the top end because it's ALL the same Platform. The Top end is the same as everything else with an additional parlor trick.
For the foreseeable future the development costs of the Mac Pro will be a rounding error on Apple's P&L.
More of an issue now and in the coming years is bandwidth to do work on low volume products. They may be happy to spend the money but diverting key staff who could be working on a volume product, say the next iPhone SoC, that's a tougher call.
The Mac are what sustained Apple pre- and post-Jobs, when it WASN'T YET about "unprofitable vanity products". If the iPhone goes down, the Macs are exactly what Apple still has going for them...
Apple’s Mac business has been highly profitable relative to its PC competitors for several decades now. Their habit of consuming the lions share of the profits in an industry, from a small fraction of the sales, started with the Mac and was extended to the iPod and then the iPhone.
Xeons have many, many PCIe lanes. Apple Silicon only needs enough HSIO for SSD and Thunderbolt ports, and they’ve released all of the non-internally-expandable machines already. They needed a chip that added 48+ PCIe lanes to the package so they could satisfy the relatively few Mac Pro customers.
And without external DRAM, they’ll never be able to provide as much memory as a low-end Intel chip in the Mac mini at the same price point. In-package DRAM is better performing but it changes the price/perf graph.
Apple simply optimized their silicon packages for 90% (or more?) of their users over the outliers.
The on package DRAM for the current macs isn't anything special. It's just normal LPDDR running at normal LPDDDR speeds, same thing you find in your phone. On package has many advantages, but it's not a hard requirement.
The bigger is how much LPDDR5 memory they can hook up to their 512bit memory controller.
Maybe the very ability to make a 512 bit-wide memory controller stems from the very short, very tightly controlled and shielded lined between the DRAM chips and the controller?
(No idea if it's so, but DRAM is such an analog HF beast that a controller needs training before it can work with a particular chip, in a particular slot on a particular system board. It's automatic but it's there, and it must have limits.)
Considering that Mac Pro is a special purpose machine, maybe it can be possible to have an architecture with multiple M2 Ultra chips and expansion options for special purpose hardware? Highly parallelizable workloads and use cases with special hardware requirements(like encoding media, ML computations etc.) can benefit from this stuff. Apple already sells cards like this for Mac Pro.
Surely that would require architectural changes and the software would need to be adapted but since these machines are niche, so is the software and Apple can sponsor the development of the few software people are using on that kind of machines. Apple is sponsoring Blender for example.
Well, the Ultra is already multiple silicon dies (chiplets) on an interposer. So this would have to be multiple packages, sitting in separate sockets on the same logic board. I agree that this seems like it could be a viable strategy to get around any packaging constraints that they might have.
I see 3 steps: a) Mac Studio, b) MacPro with PCI/MPX modules, c) Dedicated HW boxes.
I think the size of the step between a and b is becoming too small to be viable: not enough extra performance, and too high price compared to step c.
Dedicated HW boxes connected using Ethernet/Thunderbolt/USB-C have the great advantage that you are no longer bound to whatever Apple offers this year. You will just use the Mac/Windows as a "advanced graphical terminal".
Same for hardware developers. Looking back at the past 10 years of MacPro shows great uncertainties in what Apple offers going forward. Why would you spend time making a PCI card for MacPro when Apple so easily abandons support for PCI with the TrashCan while you could have a reliable market with a thunderbolt/ethernet accessory?
IMO I think the reason why they didn't release the M1 Pro mini is because they didn't want to cannibalize their mac studio release. The M1 mini chassis has a ton of empty space, and the m1 pro is easily cooled by that space and is already cooled fine by the tiny macbook pro coolers, which also means an M1 Max mini would've worked fine also.
IMO the M1 Max studio body is unnecessary too, it's only really needed for the M1 Ultra, which would lead to barely anyone buying the mac studio form factor.
There’s some very interesting speculation on the ArsTechnica forums about how expandable RAM on a Mac Pro might look. It’s not my speculation but it’s definitely not all said and done from what I’ve read.
The Mac Studio was a new product category, sitting just beneath the Mac Pro. I suspect during development they were unsure of if it would actually be the Mac Pro, that would have probably been another 2013 Mac Pro debacle though.
The Mac Studio must be decimating Mac Pro sales, it must fit what 70-80% of Mac Pro users wanted. It's going to be incredible hard to Apple to justify development of an extended M architecture for a product used by a tiny fraction of their customers.
It wouldn't surprise me if they didn't press go on full Mac Pro development until they saw how the market reacted to the Studio.
One possibility is they reintroduce the XServe (and maybe XServe Cloud) with the larger expandable architecture to help justify its development.
The only other option is expanding the Mac Studios capability with external "stackable" peripherals, such as eGPUs.
I think it would be enough for the Pro to just be the same as the highest spec of the next generation Mac Studio, in a form factor that has PCIe and RAM slots. (I wonder if they could do some kind of memory hierarchy where you have, say, 32GB of the on-board unified memory soldered on to the processor like they have now, and then another eight slots or something of regular DDR5 sticks).
XServe would probably be pretty popular with the recent shift to ARM based servers for their lower power consumption. The problem would be their insistance for them to run full blown macOS instead of a dedicated Linux based server OS.
I think there's a chance they'd give you a thin iOS-based server OS (think watchOS or tvOS) with Hypervisor.Framework and let you choose what you run on it.
> XServe would probably be pretty popular with the recent shift to ARM based servers
I've been thinking for a while they'll bring XServe back (or the Mac Pro will be rackable) because they'll save a TON of money.
1. Lower power usage in their own data centres - that's gotta be huge.
2. Buying processors from themselves instead of from Intel.
Hopefully it will help get whatever chip they're going to use in the Mac Pro to some kind of production number that means economies of scale come into play.
The only thing I can see that the Studio can't do is access hardware directly. My M1 Ultra is beyond anything I could need performance wise (I mostly do complex generative art, but I only need all 20 cores only occasionally). I imagine a few people might need more than I have but it's probably not a large number.
Apple’s high end desktop strategy has been confusing to me for several years now. They made a big deal out of the iMac Pro, even though that seemed like an obvious quick fix for power users since the new Mac Pro wasn’t ready at the time. However, I never understood why Pros would want to pay more for an an all-in-one they couldn’t self service or upgrade when they probably already had monitors they preferred using.
Then they finally released the 2019 Mac Pro at a cost that I thought was prohibitive to all but the highest end professionals. I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music production.
When they unveiled the Studio, I thought that they were replacing the Pro line with that product…but then they confirmed the Pro is still coming. I really do not know what differentiation there will be between the Studio and the new Pro. I’m curious to see what they do with expansion and dedicated GPUs, but considering they don’t play ball with Nvidia anymore it’s probably still going to be a niche product
In 2006, computing was less generous. A music producer probably needed a Mac Pro for their workflow to be efficient. Since then, Intel has massively reduced the delta between laptop and desktop chips. Coupled with the increase in computing ability of our processors while most tasks do not increase their needs (that music producer does not need more computing than in 2006) and desktops slowly faded to nothing but the most demanding tasks (ML, 8k video production, science, etc.) and Apple has gone upmarket with the Mac Pro to chase this market.
With that change, laptops have become the computer market. Look at Apple's iMac offering; they no longer have multiple models and the insides are now laptop parts. The Mac Studio is simply the desktop computer that gets the Macbook Pro chips. Since they don't want to engineer a cooling solution behind a monitor every time, we get a simple box with a ginormous fan.
The Mac Pro was supposed to be the computer with the truly desktop-only ARM chip. Even that seems cancelled now. I don't know what Apple is planning.
> […] and the insides are now laptop parts. The Mac Studio is simply the desktop computer that gets the Macbook Pro chips.
«Laptop parts» connect M1 CPU clusters to RAM via a 512-bit wide (M1 Max) and a 1024-bit wide (M1 Ultra) memory bus yielding 100 Gb/sec (per a CPU core), 200 Gb/sec (per a CPU cluster) and 400 (M1 Max)/800 (M1 Ultra) Gb/sec cumulative data transfer speeds. GPU and ANE cores access the main memory via the same wide memory bus. L1 caches (I+D) are 128kB+64 kb (efficiency cores) and 192+128 kb (performance); L2 caches are 24 Mb (M1 Max) and 48 Mb (M1 Ultra), and L3 cache is 48 Mb (Max) and 96 Mb (Ultra). Auxiliary tasks (disk encryption, video encoding/decoding etc) are off-loaded to dedicated processing units which is reminiscent to that a typical mainframe architecture with channel processors and channel programmes rather than that of a laptop.
Most «hi-end» servers today do not come anywhere close to such configurations leave alone the form factor and the net system efficiency. 512-bit wide memory bus is currently only found inside hi-end GPU cards, and the compute off-loading / accelerating units are an add-on feature for a server that may or may not be available.
Only POWER10 and Telum systems from IBM offer similar (albeit far more scalable and feature rich) designs and at a completely different price scale.
That's an interesting point. Do you know a good reference comparing laptop vs desktop cpu performance? I'm always confused by comparisons that inevitablty are affected by other laptop specific components (differences in mgpu / motherboard chipsets etc).
The MBP was plenty sufficient for most music production tasks even in 2004 when I got my first one. If I were running a pro studio with a 32+ channel mixing desk, I could see needing more, but I was able to manage 16 channels of live recording and at least 64 channels of live mix on my 2004 TiBook.
That's a really good point. I think it would be far more likely to see that same freshman with a Mac Studio in their dorm now instead of a Mac Pro even if it was at a similar price point as the Studio - just smaller and more practical.
> I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music production.
Well, even before the rise of covid-induced work-from-home, Apple has been shepherding almost all of their users onto laptops.
That college student's 2006 Mac Pro might have had 1GB RAM [1] - but these days, Apple has a laptop for users wanting 64GB RAM. And it isn't a suitcase-sized mobile workstation either.
People wanting more power than that for things like ML and scientific computing will often be shifting their workload to the cloud or a cluster anyway - it's only people doing interactive tasks like CAD and high-end video editing who are buying the Mac Pro.
The switch to working from home made high-end workstations a bit more relevant. While offices had fast and reliable internet connections, the quality of home internet is often much worse. You can't rely on the cloud as much from home as from office.
I develop bioinformatics methods and software, and I see significant productivity gains when I can run tests with full datasets locally. So far I've been using an iMac with 128 GB RAM, but I'd like to upgrade to something with 256 GB or even 512 GB. As the Mac Studio is pretty underwhelming from my perspective, the options are basically a hypothetical Mac Pro and a Linux box.
I think its fairly obvious they've hit some problems. I know they lost a lot of key people in their silicon development team so perhaps thats the reason.
Whatever it is they're struggling to get the performance they need for a Mac Pro level machine.
I'd imagine part of it is going to be that they'll want to continue using Nvidia or AMD GPU's to allow for higher performance. That can't be an easy or simple thing to get working with their custom ARM based architecture.
Also, there’s a tension between the tightly integrated M1 Ultra and the expandability implied by the Mac Pro in its classic form (which the 2019 model revived). It almost seems like they need to go multi-socket with NUMA to scale CPU and memory further. This presents a very different programming model than the shared everything model of the Mac Studio.
Hopefully what’s also left is a 27-inch iMac with M2 or M2 Pro chip inside. The current 24-inch iMac just doesn’t cut it, and the Mac Studio + Apple Display combo is way to expensive compared to the price point of Intel iMacs.
Yeah, I was going to mention 27 inch iMac as well. I used to work for a design agency and we used to buy 27 inch iMacs with upgraded CPUs and 16GB of RAM, and then we would install another 32GB of RAM ourselves. The quality of the 5K screen was good enough, savings on the RAM upgrade were significant, they were quite good computers for the price. We used them for all designers that didn't need to attend too many meetings. More senior people got laptops. During COVID we moved everyone to laptops, but I was still curious what Apple will do with the powerful iMac. Let's not forget they also offered iMac Pro, with a Xeon CPU and 128GB of RAM.
I'd imagine most people going for the Mac Studio arent touching the balked Apple Display. It's been riddled with problems and at that price point you can get far better displays now. The panel they're using dates back to 2017 so it's not exactly like you're getting the latest and greatest in screen technology.
Other displays have higher refresh rates, but the resolution is still special. Color accuracy is also great.
The annoying bug with choppy repeating audio stays unfixed 8 months after introduction and fix with the hassle of disconnecting the monitor from power for an extended time is just ridiculous.
When you really look into what's available, there's a fair bit of variation in the market for different customers, but there's incredibly few 5k+ displays at 27 or ~30 inches. Like zero if you discount the LG. Everything else is kind of ok, but not always a good replacement.
I have one, and from a pure display standpoint, it's the second best display I've ever used right behind the latest MBP 16". I don't use the speakers or webcam, and wish Apple would have left them off and dropped the price. Unfortunately there just isn't any 5k competition out there so Apple can do what they want. If it was cheaper I would have bought two, but as it stands I'm using an old 4k as my secondary monitor.
I had to replace my 27-inch iMac anyway (it just died). But I agree with you, I haven’t found a display as good as the iMac’s that isn’t €1500. I settled with what was supposed to be one of the best Dells for that size (4K, which is itself a compromise); the viewing angles are suboptimal and luminosity is not that great.
How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product?
Most of the M-series chips are shared across multiple products, but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now.
I don’t see Apple doing it simply as a vanity project, so there will have to be some innovation or new product line coming if an Apple Silicon Mac Pro is to ever exist.
It may be that an Apple Silicon Mac Pro isn't profitable, but it's still good business sense to produce it. It gives them a way to push the cutting edge in a way that none of their other products do, and the things they invent for it may filter down the product line. At the same time, the sort of professionals that buy Mac Pros are good customers to have, even if there aren't many of them. Ignoring them has hurt Apple in the past. At the end of the day, Apple can afford to lose a bit of money on a small volume product for a few generations while they work out the kinks.
Yeah, that’s a common analysis people seem to miss even though Apple is very clearly vertically integrated. Software maintenance costs are so much significantly higher that unifying HW is significantly more value even if the margins aren’t as good. The high end macs serve as cachet status symbols amongst the creators and designers which tend to contain a lot of trend setters + mind share + creative software being optimized around the macs which then means that hardware is purchased at disproportionately higher levels (+ potential downstream effects where if you’re mostly a max shop already, shouldn’t you just get the MacBook Air and other Apple devices to simplify corporate device management?). Also a unified HW platform ALSO reduces software maintenance costs for partners and which is a nice virtuous cycle of encouraging that porting to happen. Apple has a uniquely holistic view of the market place that they’ve cultivated over decades and I’ve seen no sign that they’ve ever lost sight of that like many competitors due at much smaller market caps.
Exactly this. There's a cost to supporting Intel forever only for the Mac Pro and nothing else.
Not only a cost to Apple, but also a cost to 3rd party Mac developers, who would be even less likely to have the resources to support the Mac Pro for its own sake.
Apple dropped PowerPC support in Mac OS X (10.6) 3.5 years after the Intel transition started, and they dropped Rosetta support in Mac OS X (10.7) 2 years after that.
IIRC the last PPC Mac hardware was discontinued very soon after the Intel transition started.
I wouldn't be surprised if they keep internal Intel support anyway - as well as other architectures.
The difference would be supporting Intel publicly - with third-party developers. As the target for Mac Pros won't just be running a load of electron apps.
Do we know how long it will take? Apple doesn't have a huge history of backward compatibility. This could be a not so subtle nudge to force everyone to re-buy their hardware at a time people are keeping their computer hardware for longer.
Presumably it isn't that low volume. Just low volume compared to their other products.
They can probably heavily base a more powerful chip on their existing designs but with more cores & cache, so design should be relatively cheap. Manufacturing the masks etc. is probably around $10m which is probably fine given how expensive Mac Pros are (and it would simplify their software if they can ditch Intel entirely).
>How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product?
Which is the question I have been asking since 2015. From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap.
>but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now.
It surely does. Except it will be the only Mac in the lineup without Metal Support and Apple's increasingly important NPU for Machine Learning features. I dont see it as a good trade off.
Which is the question I have been asking since 2015. From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap.
To me the only reason they still make products like the Mac Pro is for brand reputation and face-saving. It’s like when a big auto maker sponsors a formula 1 racing team. There’s no profit in formula 1 (for the auto makers). It’s just a giant money pit!
Silly idea: could they put a M-series processor connected to a Xeon as a coprocessor to get the “benefits” of both wrt. adding their NPU stuff? Would that even make any sense?
> How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product?
They are not starting from scratch. The Apple Silicon MX chips all share a common base, and are related to the AX chips. When every product Apple sells is using some version of the same family of chips, a lot of the design cost is spread across all Apple devices.
Then it's just the incremental design cost that must be recouped for things like (speculated) off die RAM.
Low volume simply means higher unit prices, doesn't it? The Mac Pro as an explicitly professional high-end machine is OK to be expensive. Its USP compared to fast x86 machines is that it runs macOS.
I am under the impression they do not run macOS in their own datacenters. And, unlike mortals, if they need to run macOS in datacenters, they're not bound by their own license to never virtualize macOS on non-macOS hosts, they can do as they please.
A high-end chip usable in the Mac Pro will draw more power than the M1 Ultra at 60W. I don’t think they are gonna fit a chip like that into any wearable unless the device comes with a backpack with the processing elements (and battery) in it.
I don’t know if it’s the fault of Apple Silicon, but on my Mac applications regularly crash. That includes ACDSee, IINA, qBittorent, Edge, KeePassXC, Sublime Text, Sublime Merge… There is at least one crash every 3 days. Nothing like it happens on my Windows, Linux or FreeBSD systems. It’s my first Mac, so I can’t compare this experience to Intel Macs, and so I don’t know if it’s just that MacOS is so unstable in general, or if those are still pains of migration to a new ISA.
(Often, when one application crashes, a couple others follow not long after.)
> It’s my first Mac, so I can’t compare this experience to Intel Macs, and so I don’t know if it’s just that MacOS is so unstable in general, or if those are still pains of migration to a new ISA.
Your issues are not normal. For example, here on my Studio, the uptime is 9 days, with Sublime Text started from the beginning and used quite heavily during most days. It has 5 windows with 5 to 10 tabs in each with no issue whatsoever. My experience with my previous (Intel) Macs was about the same; I haven't seen visible effects of the ISA change besides not hearing any fan anymore (and a speed bump, but I tend to use my computers for a very long time, so there is always a speed boost when I get a new one).
If it is under warranty, it's probably worth having a chat with Apple support. Otherwise, I would recommend trying to diagnose hardware failures (particularly RAM; beyond 8GB it should not swap regularly-used applications).
MacOS is rightly criticised for becoming less robust in several ways, but that is mostly fancy new features. And Time Machine. For some reason they cannot seem to get it perfect, which is a shame because it is the best backup solution I have used yet. The core OS is quite reliable and really should not crash things like that.
I’ve never had Sublime Text crash on any platform. I‘ve used it for years. Sounds like a hardware problem. Or if you’ve never done a clean install, bad configuration/apps buried in old data.
In general I find macOS very stable. Though I do not use any of the same apps you do aside from Sublime Text and qBittorrent
On qBittorrent specifically the application can often "feel" like it is hanging because it brings up modal windows behind the main window, meaning you need to drag the main window away to interact with the modal and the main window will be unresponsive in that time. This may make it feel like it is hanging, when really it's just down to a non-native macOS application not using the correct APIs to display modal sheets
I do occasionally get other application crashes, maybe a couple per month, usually it's down to the application doing something it shouldn't. My current macOS uptime is 28 days, which is when I last installed an update that required a restart
I can't remember the last time I had something crash on one of my macs, though I don't run any of the above. But it seems like it could be a problem with your machine
I am not experiencing any crashes on mine. Of the listed apps I use IINA, qBittorent, Sublime Text. I use around 30 apps frequently, none of them are crashing.
Have you tried reinstalling everything from scratch? If yes, then it is very likely a HW issue. If others suggest a better method for checking where the fault lies, other than reinstalling, then follow their advice.
Yeah, compared to my 12th-gen i9 XPS laptop, my M1 Pro *never* crashes. Granted, the XPS now crashes much less since I switched to Linux 5.19, but it still hangs (mostly due to wake from sleep issues) much more often than my MBP.
There was info a while back that memory management issues become more obvious on Apple Silicon, problems that x86 is more forgiving of. Can’t find the source unfortunately.
Readit News
- A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be. This in turn could enhance the Apple / Mac brand for a certain group of users.
- An aspirational product for users who think that they might need more power in the future.
- A means of keeping companies that need a small number of powerful machines in the Apple camp.
- A proving ground for technology that ultimately makes its way into volume products.
All of these factors could make the product justify its development costs even if actual sales are small. I doubt that the highest end models of some premium car brands recoup their development costs but their value to the brand offsets those costs.
Halo cars like Corvette Z06 are exactly the right analogy. They sell at most 8000/year; there is no way it’s profitable as a line item. But it gets made for all of those indirect reasons.
The danger there is what if it isn't? Apple's riding high right now but what if AMD or Qualcomm or whoever takes the next crown? This is one of the things that almost killed the company back in the G4 days. Jobs would be up there on stage essentially lying to our faces about the "Personal Supercomputer" when any of us could look at the literally-twice-as-fast Coppermine boxes on our desks to see the truth.
Computers and technology are ephemeral and quirky. Apple's brand isn't and has never been[1] about selling "chips" or "computers". They sell "modes of interaction".
[1] The last pure-tech play from Apple was the Apple II+.
Edit - this is a comment about branding ie how Apple presents itself not actual performance.
The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.
NOBODY has transitioned to an other architecture like Apple has, nor has the industry been kicked in the shorts as many times as by apple. (wholesale inclusion of GPU in the OS, migration from Motorola, to Power PC, to Intel, to Arm to X Efficienty + Y Performance Cores...and nobody wrings as much out of the ARM architecture as Apple.
It's 'the same OS' from the watch, TV, Airpods to the Mac Pro.
There is no cost cutting the top end because it's ALL the same Platform. The Top end is the same as everything else with an additional parlor trick.
More of an issue now and in the coming years is bandwidth to do work on low volume products. They may be happy to spend the money but diverting key staff who could be working on a volume product, say the next iPhone SoC, that's a tougher call.
And without external DRAM, they’ll never be able to provide as much memory as a low-end Intel chip in the Mac mini at the same price point. In-package DRAM is better performing but it changes the price/perf graph.
Apple simply optimized their silicon packages for 90% (or more?) of their users over the outliers.
The bigger is how much LPDDR5 memory they can hook up to their 512bit memory controller.
(No idea if it's so, but DRAM is such an analog HF beast that a controller needs training before it can work with a particular chip, in a particular slot on a particular system board. It's automatic but it's there, and it must have limits.)
Surely that would require architectural changes and the software would need to be adapted but since these machines are niche, so is the software and Apple can sponsor the development of the few software people are using on that kind of machines. Apple is sponsoring Blender for example.
I think the size of the step between a and b is becoming too small to be viable: not enough extra performance, and too high price compared to step c.
Dedicated HW boxes connected using Ethernet/Thunderbolt/USB-C have the great advantage that you are no longer bound to whatever Apple offers this year. You will just use the Mac/Windows as a "advanced graphical terminal".
Same for hardware developers. Looking back at the past 10 years of MacPro shows great uncertainties in what Apple offers going forward. Why would you spend time making a PCI card for MacPro when Apple so easily abandons support for PCI with the TrashCan while you could have a reliable market with a thunderbolt/ethernet accessory?
IMO the M1 Max studio body is unnecessary too, it's only really needed for the M1 Ultra, which would lead to barely anyone buying the mac studio form factor.
The Mac Studio must be decimating Mac Pro sales, it must fit what 70-80% of Mac Pro users wanted. It's going to be incredible hard to Apple to justify development of an extended M architecture for a product used by a tiny fraction of their customers.
It wouldn't surprise me if they didn't press go on full Mac Pro development until they saw how the market reacted to the Studio.
One possibility is they reintroduce the XServe (and maybe XServe Cloud) with the larger expandable architecture to help justify its development.
The only other option is expanding the Mac Studios capability with external "stackable" peripherals, such as eGPUs.
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I've been thinking for a while they'll bring XServe back (or the Mac Pro will be rackable) because they'll save a TON of money.
1. Lower power usage in their own data centres - that's gotta be huge.
2. Buying processors from themselves instead of from Intel.
Hopefully it will help get whatever chip they're going to use in the Mac Pro to some kind of production number that means economies of scale come into play.
Then they finally released the 2019 Mac Pro at a cost that I thought was prohibitive to all but the highest end professionals. I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music production.
When they unveiled the Studio, I thought that they were replacing the Pro line with that product…but then they confirmed the Pro is still coming. I really do not know what differentiation there will be between the Studio and the new Pro. I’m curious to see what they do with expansion and dedicated GPUs, but considering they don’t play ball with Nvidia anymore it’s probably still going to be a niche product
With that change, laptops have become the computer market. Look at Apple's iMac offering; they no longer have multiple models and the insides are now laptop parts. The Mac Studio is simply the desktop computer that gets the Macbook Pro chips. Since they don't want to engineer a cooling solution behind a monitor every time, we get a simple box with a ginormous fan.
The Mac Pro was supposed to be the computer with the truly desktop-only ARM chip. Even that seems cancelled now. I don't know what Apple is planning.
«Laptop parts» connect M1 CPU clusters to RAM via a 512-bit wide (M1 Max) and a 1024-bit wide (M1 Ultra) memory bus yielding 100 Gb/sec (per a CPU core), 200 Gb/sec (per a CPU cluster) and 400 (M1 Max)/800 (M1 Ultra) Gb/sec cumulative data transfer speeds. GPU and ANE cores access the main memory via the same wide memory bus. L1 caches (I+D) are 128kB+64 kb (efficiency cores) and 192+128 kb (performance); L2 caches are 24 Mb (M1 Max) and 48 Mb (M1 Ultra), and L3 cache is 48 Mb (Max) and 96 Mb (Ultra). Auxiliary tasks (disk encryption, video encoding/decoding etc) are off-loaded to dedicated processing units which is reminiscent to that a typical mainframe architecture with channel processors and channel programmes rather than that of a laptop.
Most «hi-end» servers today do not come anywhere close to such configurations leave alone the form factor and the net system efficiency. 512-bit wide memory bus is currently only found inside hi-end GPU cards, and the compute off-loading / accelerating units are an add-on feature for a server that may or may not be available.
Only POWER10 and Telum systems from IBM offer similar (albeit far more scalable and feature rich) designs and at a completely different price scale.
Well, even before the rise of covid-induced work-from-home, Apple has been shepherding almost all of their users onto laptops.
That college student's 2006 Mac Pro might have had 1GB RAM [1] - but these days, Apple has a laptop for users wanting 64GB RAM. And it isn't a suitcase-sized mobile workstation either.
People wanting more power than that for things like ML and scientific computing will often be shifting their workload to the cloud or a cluster anyway - it's only people doing interactive tasks like CAD and high-end video editing who are buying the Mac Pro.
[1] https://youtu.be/l72MsGZQA8Q?t=418
I develop bioinformatics methods and software, and I see significant productivity gains when I can run tests with full datasets locally. So far I've been using an iMac with 128 GB RAM, but I'd like to upgrade to something with 256 GB or even 512 GB. As the Mac Studio is pretty underwhelming from my perspective, the options are basically a hypothetical Mac Pro and a Linux box.
Whatever it is they're struggling to get the performance they need for a Mac Pro level machine.
I'd imagine part of it is going to be that they'll want to continue using Nvidia or AMD GPU's to allow for higher performance. That can't be an easy or simple thing to get working with their custom ARM based architecture.
Maybe, but people are always coming and going on any team. This whole story felt like a tempest in a teapot type of thing.
IMO, given the typical lead time of hardware, we're finally seeing Apple have issues stemming from covid/supply chain breakdowns.
Most of the M-series chips are shared across multiple products, but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now.
I don’t see Apple doing it simply as a vanity project, so there will have to be some innovation or new product line coming if an Apple Silicon Mac Pro is to ever exist.
It will simplify MacOS when they end Intel support.
Not only a cost to Apple, but also a cost to 3rd party Mac developers, who would be even less likely to have the resources to support the Mac Pro for its own sake.
Apple dropped PowerPC support in Mac OS X (10.6) 3.5 years after the Intel transition started, and they dropped Rosetta support in Mac OS X (10.7) 2 years after that.
IIRC the last PPC Mac hardware was discontinued very soon after the Intel transition started.
The difference would be supporting Intel publicly - with third-party developers. As the target for Mac Pros won't just be running a load of electron apps.
The question is how they will pay for a high-end chip when they no longer can rely on Intel to spread out the development cost among many customers.
They can probably heavily base a more powerful chip on their existing designs but with more cores & cache, so design should be relatively cheap. Manufacturing the masks etc. is probably around $10m which is probably fine given how expensive Mac Pros are (and it would simplify their software if they can ditch Intel entirely).
Somebody buying a mac pro would probably expect support for discrete and expandable ram.
Which is the question I have been asking since 2015. From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap.
>but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now.
It surely does. Except it will be the only Mac in the lineup without Metal Support and Apple's increasingly important NPU for Machine Learning features. I dont see it as a good trade off.
To me the only reason they still make products like the Mac Pro is for brand reputation and face-saving. It’s like when a big auto maker sponsors a formula 1 racing team. There’s no profit in formula 1 (for the auto makers). It’s just a giant money pit!
Some caveats:
* maybe not true if you go back to the introduction of metal but idk
* metal feature support varies by hardware
They are not starting from scratch. The Apple Silicon MX chips all share a common base, and are related to the AX chips. When every product Apple sells is using some version of the same family of chips, a lot of the design cost is spread across all Apple devices.
Then it's just the incremental design cost that must be recouped for things like (speculated) off die RAM.
That is until you run the calculation when the cost of doing it are in the tens of thousands per unit. Suddenly it doesn't make much sense.
In their own datacentres?
(Often, when one application crashes, a couple others follow not long after.)
Your issues are not normal. For example, here on my Studio, the uptime is 9 days, with Sublime Text started from the beginning and used quite heavily during most days. It has 5 windows with 5 to 10 tabs in each with no issue whatsoever. My experience with my previous (Intel) Macs was about the same; I haven't seen visible effects of the ISA change besides not hearing any fan anymore (and a speed bump, but I tend to use my computers for a very long time, so there is always a speed boost when I get a new one).
If it is under warranty, it's probably worth having a chat with Apple support. Otherwise, I would recommend trying to diagnose hardware failures (particularly RAM; beyond 8GB it should not swap regularly-used applications).
MacOS is rightly criticised for becoming less robust in several ways, but that is mostly fancy new features. And Time Machine. For some reason they cannot seem to get it perfect, which is a shame because it is the best backup solution I have used yet. The core OS is quite reliable and really should not crash things like that.
[edit] There is a wealth of information about AS Macs here, the site is well worth a bookmark: https://eclecticlight.co/mac-troubleshooting-summary/
On qBittorrent specifically the application can often "feel" like it is hanging because it brings up modal windows behind the main window, meaning you need to drag the main window away to interact with the modal and the main window will be unresponsive in that time. This may make it feel like it is hanging, when really it's just down to a non-native macOS application not using the correct APIs to display modal sheets
I do occasionally get other application crashes, maybe a couple per month, usually it's down to the application doing something it shouldn't. My current macOS uptime is 28 days, which is when I last installed an update that required a restart
To be fair, MacOS itself doesn't seem to have issues. There seems to be no upper limit to possible uptime. It's just applications.
But without knowing the machine and OS version that you have my data point is perhaps not very helpful.
Have you tried reinstalling everything from scratch? If yes, then it is very likely a HW issue. If others suggest a better method for checking where the fault lies, other than reinstalling, then follow their advice.