Apple Silicon Mac Pro Revealed at WWDC 2023

[etorix]

So putting the above selection of audio cards in two enclosures (III + III-D) would come at two thirds of the extra cost of a Mac Pro M2 over a Mac Studio M2. Easy choice…

 

[D-One]

I remember all the 2013 Mac Pro users that tried to expand with everything they needed via Thunderbolt. It was some of the worst cable/desk clutter scenarios I've ever seen. It's also much more expensive to go that route. I'd want to use what I already have and connect it to PCIe slots internally. The trashcan MP still got too hot even though everything but the AMD FirePro cards were external.

Here's some of prices Sonnet is asking for external PCIe enclosures. Add to that the cost of certified TH4 cables.

View attachment 567512

Yeah, no doubt. Some devices might also require short cables which would only make cable management an even worst nightmare. The Trash MP had a form-over-function design imho, but then again I'm not the target audience so I am not even sure I have a say in that, I considered buying one at the time but built a Hackintosh instead.

As far as price, I am not sure whether that's still true or not if you take into account the initial cost of a current MP VS a Mac Studio. Also, I suspect that if one is in this high-end bracket you wouldn't go adapting pcie devices to be external, that's sounds very risky, you would just buy the external versions from the same brands, which had no alternative to stay on the Mac market during the trash can era other than making things external.

The Pro industry didn't stop when Apple stopped making computers with PCIe, it just frustrated the heck out of it.

Thanks for the labelling for the rest of us. So these are PCIe x1 audio cards (some with daughter cards, which is a good use case for a double height x8 slot). I suppose that, individually, any one of these cards could fit in a Thunderbolt enclosure. But there's the sheer number of them. One enclosure may be OK; but four or five of them, each enclosure with its own discrete power supply? Chained, with added latency? Or with a dedicated Thunderbolt port for each? There may not be enough ports to begin with.
I'm no audio user, and to each his own. But if I needed so many cards to work with, I'd want them in a single chassis. If that chassis costs 3000 extra, so be it—especially if it passes as work expenses.

No prob.
Well, again, putting that particular list of gear on enclosures sounds like a terrible idea to me VS buying the external versions... Dealing with a power supply for each, risking compatibility problems, etc... Pro Audio guys tend to stick to what works and want no problems, ever, if that means sticking with an OS from 4 years ago that's what they will do, so it's hard to imagine these folks using that external enclosure route.

Regarding the number I have no idea tbh, surely there's a limit for chaining, bandwidth, or Ports.

Consider that if funds aren't a big problem for you then you likely max out either approach, internal or external, meaning if I have 6 pcie lanes available I will plan for it specifically when I buy things and I will max that out but that doesn't necessarily mean I can have the exact same amount of stuff externally.. the same way I can't shove 15 external devices internally with only 6 pcie lanes if I had planned for an external approach instead... So this can kind of works both ways.

 

[mcity]

There's no reason video cards won't work if AMD, Nvidia, or Intel wrote macOS drivers for their cards.

Applications too need to support third party GPUs to perform well. Example FCP, and other demanding apps from third parties like Adobe.

 

[Azimuth1]

Apple has taken position, against dGPU in the AppleSilicon line, and I do not see AMD porting drivers to macOS on its own initiative—much less Nvidia.

Edit. Waiting for official specifications may be an effective alternative to speculation. With 75 W from a x16 slot and 300 W auxiliary, the new Mac Pro would barely manage to feed a RX7900XTX (if it had drivers…) but not a RX4090 (450 W TDP).

I love this "edit" part!
it's very very thin, but maybe we have still an hope for having a NAVI3 card on board of our hackintoshes. Even an RX7700XT or 7800XT would be nice in terms of coding/decoding possibilities against an 6900XT.

 

[bombardier10]

Your hack likely cannot process audio and video at the same level.

This is a joke ? Now I have performance far beyond fastest new Mac Pro for a fraction of the cost. Most mac users can only dream about it because they would never spend so much money on such a machine . So I dont think that my hackintosh is not "at the same level".

Believe or not but 90% professional video production (or more) is done on PC/Windows . Also, it's not that macOS gives what more performance. For example if we use Adobe Premiere under Windows so this same Adobe Premiere will not run faster on a mac of comparable performance.

Therefore, price is an important element here. if you are doing business you don't like to spend more money to achieve the same thing. And this is the reason why we use hackintosh.

Of course I would like to have new Mac Pro and also maybe change my car on new Ferrari )

 

[Azimuth1]

SSD in the original Mac Studios can be upgraded too.

Basically it's not possible. What has been possible is to swap your SSD's memory modules with other identical ones, despite the fact all Mac Studios have 2 empty slots. More info here: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/...-upgrade-mac-studio-internal-ssd-storage.html

 

[pastrychef]

Basically it's not possible. What has been possible is to swap your SSD's memory modules with other identical ones, despite the fact all Mac Studios have 2 empty slots. More info here: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/...-upgrade-mac-studio-internal-ssd-storage.html

Wrong.

Upgrading Mac Studio storage

Hi, just tested yesterday an upgrade of a plain basic MacStudio M1 Max (2022) from 512GB to 4TB. and it works : take off the 512 GB NAND insert in the right order the two 2TB NANDs inside the slots restaure the MacStudio bridgeOS with another Mac and AppleConfigurator et voilà ...

forums.macrumors.com

The only difficult part is finding a place to purchase SSD modules.

 

[trs96]

As the first Gen Mac Studios age, I'm certain someone will produce and sell a compatible SSD that end users can upgrade with. It may even be Apple. It's a really capable ASi Mac that would not be ready for recycling in a few years from now. Remember that you can also boot from an external NVMe SSD via a TH port. So that's one other option if the internal Apple SSD fails for whatever reason.

 

[pastrychef]

As the first Gen Mac Studios age, I'm certain someone will produce and sell a compatible SSD that end users can upgrade with. It may even be Apple. It's a really capable ASi Mac that would not be ready for recycling in a few years from now. Remember that you can also boot from an external NVMe SSD via a TH port. So that's one other option if the internal Apple SSD fails for whatever reason.

Booting is not possible from an external drive if the internal SSD fails. It is explained in the first video on post #97.

 

[trs96]

Booting is not possible from an external drive if the internal SSD fails.

OK. He says that you can boot from an external SSD in the video. But he doesn't add the part about internal SSD failure. He says that if you remove the Apple SSD it won't boot. Nothing about it failing. Mac studio owners can't be prevented from reselling their used Apple Mac Studio NANDs on places like Ebay. That will happen eventually. After your original boot drive fails, you could install a smallish previously used 512GB NVMe and boot from external NVMe (say 4TB) drives. If you know what is required to do that. It's not straight forward. The second video goes into detail on that.