Apple Silicon Mac Pro Revealed at WWDC 2023

[c-o-pr]

To me, this latesr Mac Pro announcement looks like a stop-gap...

First and foremost: That Apple released this Mac Pro means there's a future to the marque, but it's arriving incrementally.

With AppleSi they didn't just make a new Mac Pro, from their perspective they replaced the entire PC industry with their own kit! It's an amazing accomplishment from this perspective.

We might assume, being given a new box with all those slots, that Apple will provide a catalog of bolt-in modules that to address narrower workstation market segments, e.g., Afterburner. Which leads to a question of lacking pomp and ceremony...

Due to loss of Steve Jobs and the ascension of a supply-chain mgr to the masthead, it's not surprising that Apple new product keynotes are flat. I certainly wish for more pizazz than just dumping an in-progress redesign at a conference... without even the web updated!

But maybe they've internalized that Jobs' showboating could be a hazard in the face of their overwhelming and inevitable architecture challenges. Calling a lot of attention to the change makes it seem risky. Apple still has to prove they can make this enormous design progress work. Well, so far has so good!

Re review a few posts ago:

Pining for elite PC gamer GPUs seems off the mark to me. The 40xx series will soon be passe, just like every increment of PC kit. It's the big picture that matters. —But they did just drop-in DX12 support out of blue!

It's not surprising to me that hackintoshers want to keep talking in a vernacular of Wintel PC. But I suggest that Apple has plans to soon regard that vernacular as outdated.

Hackintoshers have to face it's the end of an era, but at same time what's really being lost? PC and Clippy are still gonna be here for everyone who needs them!

 

[ramazarusx]

To me, this latesr Mac Pro announcement looks like a stop-gap...

Yup. I think they just should’ve waited till M3.

 

[trs96]

PC and Clippy are still gonna be here for everyone who needs them!

Clippy does still show up in modern Windows versions. Use Cortana to search for "office assistant" and you get this.

Once MS Bob got cancelled, I left the Windows ecosystem for PowerPC and OS X.
I know, the little dog Rover made it into XP but it just wasn't the same.

 

[pastrychef]

As I said before in specialized software the MacPro and MacStudio are very competitive and in some cases even exceeding them, but at the end of the day I personally don’t care if it got ARM or x86, OpenCL or Metal as long as they do what I need them to do for a reasonable price.

For my day to day usage the i9-13xxx and dual 6900 is more than sufficient if not exceeding the MacStudio/MacPro for the tasks I need, for the rest I’ve got Farms and Linux workstations picking up when it fails.

I’m not an average Apple consumer that can be wowed and oozed by new shiny things, I’ve had their products from PowerBooks to latest M2 Max laptops. It’s business for me, how much time I can reasonably save on certain tasks and to be honest I never cared how they looked or how much power they’ve used.

Just my opinion, from being in tech for almost 30y.

If the stuff doesn't work with macOS, I just don't care. Believe me, I've tried to use Windows... But it just always gave me problems and I always spent too much time trying to fix it, usually without success and I just had to do clean installs. In contrast, I went over a decade at one point without having to do a clean install of Mac OS X/macOS despite having updated OSes and computer systems (including going hackintosh) multiple times.

Yup. I still have my PowerBook Pismo somewhere in my closet. IMO, one of the best laptop designs ever. I don't even remember what happened to my old Power Mac 7200... I may have left it at one of my exes home when we broke up...

I'm less wowed by shiny than I am by build quality and materials.

I never really paid attention to power consumption until I had my MacPro5,1. That thing made my home so damned hot, I was forced to pay attention to power consumption. That thing made it very difficult for my a/c to cool my home in the summers. Since replacing my gear with a Mac Studio, there has been a huge difference in the temps in my home and, for the first time in decades, I had to turn on the heat in my home this past winter.

 

[pastrychef]

To me, this latesr Mac Pro announcement looks like a stop-gap...

First and foremost: That Apple released this Mac Pro means there's a future to the marque, but it's arriving incrementally.

With AppleSi they didn't just make a new Mac Pro, from their perspective they replaced the entire PC industry with their own kit! It's an amazing accomplishment from this perspective.

We might assume, being given a new box with all those slots, that Apple will provide a catalog of bolt-in modules that to address narrower workstation market segments, e.g., Afterburner. Which leads to a question of lacking pomp and ceremony...

Due to loss of Steve Jobs and the ascension of a supply-chain mgr to the masthead, it's not surprising that Apple new product keynotes are flat. I certainly wish for more pizazz than just dumping an in-progress redesign at a conference... without even the web updated!

But maybe they've internalized that Jobs' showboating could be a hazard in the face of their overwhelming and inevitable architecture challenges. Calling a lot of attention to the change makes it seem risky. Apple still has to prove they can make this enormous design progress work. Well, so far has so good!

Re review a few posts ago:

Pining for elite PC gamer GPUs seems off the mark to me. The 40xx series will soon be passe, just like every increment of PC kit. It's the big picture that matters. —But they did just drop-in DX12 support out of blue!

It's not surprising to me that hackintoshers want to keep talking in a vernacular of Wintel PC. But I suggest that Apple has plans to soon regard that vernacular as outdated.

Hackintoshers have to face it's the end of an era, but at same time what's really being lost? PC and Clippy are still gonna be here for everyone who needs them!

There's no question it's a stopgap system. But it had to be done to hammer in the final nail in the Intel Mac coffin. They couldn't wait any longer.

 

[ramazarusx]

I had to turn on the heat in my home this past winter.

I can relate.

 

[scottkendall]

I also agree with him on how "necessary" PCI-e slots are anymore. Without video card options, PCI-e slot usefulness falls off the table. Sure there are some things where Thunderbolt just can't compare, i.e. fast storage and high speed (40Gb+) NICs. But it's a very small subset of customers that will need that stuff. Honestly, how many users here have 40 or 100Gb networking? For things like AV I/O, Thunderbolt is sufficient in most cases.

For the vast major of people the PCI-e slots are not mandatory! However, there is still a market who needs/wants them. For some it is simply just the idea of expandability even if you do not use them.

If you have a bunch of peripherals that can run on Thunderbolt or PCI-e, I would take the PCI-e option due to latency but also to keep things neat and tidy. I really did not like the octopus that was the 2013 Mac Pro, it ruined the sleekness of the trashcan itself, and I would imagine the same thing would become true with the Mac Studio if you have a lot of peripherals that you need. Specifically like the picture TRS posted that was an octopus even internally. I personally would only have some cards for NVMe Drives in those PCI-e slots but that's about all. I have friends that have that analog audio equipment that only will connect with a PCI-e card and refuse to use adapters. Albeit that market is extremely small. For the first time in Apple history they have have ticked the box in all market segments from the $600 Mac Mini to $12,000 maxed out Mac Pro; there is something for everyone.

 

[jiffyslot]

...When apple released iMac 19 without a T2 chip and the 2018 Mac mini with a T2 chip, the Mac mini was Womping the iMac. There is just something about having a dedicated hardware encoder that tips the scales.

While I agree with you, (fwiw) I had to disable the T2 on my 2018 Mac Mini (max-spec) because the T2 caused problems with Pro Tools. Hopefully, problems like this won't be an issue for the latest Mac Studio or the Mac Pro.

 

[scottkendall]

While I agree with you, (fwiw) I had to disable the T2 on my 2018 Mac Mini (max-spec) because the T2 caused problems with Pro Tools. Hopefully, problems like this won't be an issue for the latest Mac Studio or the Mac Pro.

Is it still causing issues? I know at the very beginning Avid was having some issues with certain bit rates I was under the assumption that was all fixed now.

 

[Barryjp]

The macos market is limited to 5%. Maybe with hackintosh it's 6%, but that's all.

I think the hackintosh percentage is a lot higher than people think.

If we look at OS share, on desktop in late 2022, about 14% of users were running macOS. Yet if we look at hardware sales, only about 8.6% of computers sold annually are Macs.

So there's a large difference there, and it may be that as much as 30-40% of people running macOS could be running it on non-Apple hardware. We'll find out once Intel support is dropped from macOS. If the macOS user share drops to be more on a par with the percentage of Apple computers sold, then we'll know that those people were probably using a hackintosh and either migrated to another OS or bought a Mac.