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.

• whywhywhywhy

  today at 10:04 AM

  > 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.

• HerbManic

  today at 4:53 AM

  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...

  • pjmlp

    today at 8:21 AM

    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.

  • zozbot234

    today at 5:02 AM

    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.

    • GeekyBear

      today at 6:04 AM

      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

        today at 8:18 AM

        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.

    • wpm

      today at 5:09 AM

      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

        today at 6:06 AM

        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.

• robotswantdata

  today at 7:24 AM

  DGX workstations, expensive but allow PCI cards as well.

  https://marketplace.nvidia.com/en-us/enterprise/personal-ai-...

  • fooker

    today at 9:42 AM

    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.

  • QuantumNomad_

    today at 8:07 AM

    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.

    • fotcorn

      today at 9:05 AM

      Cheapest i know if is around $96k

    • cudima

      today at 8:46 AM

      $4000

• spacedcowboy

  today at 8:23 AM

  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

    today at 9:06 AM

    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!

    • spacedcowboy

      today at 10:09 AM

      > 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 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... :)

    • asimovDev

      today at 9:33 AM

      lowest is probably an apple trade in if available, but i can't imagine how bad of a price hit it will be.

      • spacedcowboy

        today at 10:13 AM

        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 (£1280). Yeah, no.

• port11

  today at 8:23 AM

  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.

• tannhaeuser

  today at 6:46 AM

  For LLMs and other pure memory-bound workloads, but for eg. diffusion models their FPU SIMD performance is lacking.

• fooker

  today at 9:34 AM

  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.

• hermanzegerman

  today at 9:25 AM

  Framework offers the AI Ryzen Max with 192GB 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...

  • eigenspace

    today at 9:32 AM

    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.

  • freeqaz

    today at 9:37 AM

    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)

  • rl3

    today at 9:28 AM

    128GB*

• DeathArrow

  today at 8:08 AM

  Still, running 2 to 4 5090 will beat anything Apple has to offer for both inference and training.

• rubyn00bie

  today at 5:22 AM

  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.

  • AnthonyMouse

    today at 8:36 AM

    > 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

      today at 10:13 AM

      > 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.

  • wolfhumble

    today at 9:29 AM

    > 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 . . .

  • hermanzegerman

    today at 9:27 AM

    Nvidia is definitely preparing for this with the Opensource LLMs they are currently developing

  • pjmlp

    today at 8:23 AM

    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

      today at 8:39 AM

      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

        today at 9:40 AM

        You mean like the Neo marketing materials put out by Apple?

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.

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.

• linguae

  today at 4:13 AM

  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.

• matthewfcarlson

  today at 3:09 AM

  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.

  • spacedcowboy

    today at 8:26 AM

    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

    today at 9:35 AM

    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

  • zeusk

    today at 3:23 AM

    > 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

      today at 3:33 AM

      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.

  • markn951

    today at 3:12 AM

    > Opinions are my own obvs.

    Whose else would they be?

    • 9wzYQbTYsAIc

      today at 10:16 AM

      >> 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

    • TheDong

      today at 3:53 AM

      > 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

      today at 7:46 AM

        > > Opinions are my own obvs.
      
        > Whose else would they be?
      

      On the internet? Often the opinions of others they see getting upvotes.

    • OJFord

      today at 8:10 AM

      An employer's, especially as they stated having worked (and perhaps still) at Apple in the same comment.

      • code_duck

        today at 8:35 AM

        Oh, I interpreted it as “did work using a Mac Pro” vs helped develop the Mac Pro itself.

    • mandeepj

      today at 3:35 AM

      Maybe he was trying to say he isn’t a spokesman for anyone else :-)

• JumpCrisscross

  today at 3:27 AM

  > 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

    today at 9:01 AM

    The very definition of a halo product.

• moogly

  today at 3:49 AM

  > That workstation on your desk should

  Under your desk, right? Right?!

  • kgwgk

    today at 7:57 AM

    It’s a desktop computer, not a deskbottom computer.

  • petepete

    today at 9:54 AM

    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.

  • fouc

    today at 8:01 AM

    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.

  • swiftcoder

    today at 7:32 AM

    I mean... if you spent $7,000 on it, do you really want to hide it away under the desk?

    • yoz-y

      today at 7:50 AM

      Yes, because you’re buying a tool, not a conversation piece.

      • swiftcoder

        today at 9:33 AM

        Por que no los dos? ¯\(ツ)/¯

• kmeisthax

  today at 3:33 AM

  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

    today at 8:49 AM

    > 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.

• mrheosuper

  today at 4:22 AM

  >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 ?

• jjtheblunt

  today at 3:41 AM

  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.

• today at 3:33 AM

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.

• labcomputer

  today at 5:07 AM

  > 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

    today at 5:45 AM

    > 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

      today at 6:19 AM

      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

    today at 6:20 AM

    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.

• magic_hamster

  today at 12:42 AM

  > gone are the days of PCIe.

  My GPU, NVMe drives and motherboard might disagree.

  • rayiner

    today at 1:21 AM

    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/comments/sbegpb/gpu_in_pci...

    • mrheosuper

      today at 4:16 AM

      Your example uses GTX1080, which is a very old GPU. Current flagship consumer GPU will take a harder hit on low bandwidth PCIE.

      • rayiner

        today at 7:07 AM

        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%.”

        • mrheosuper

          today at 8:58 AM

          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

        • AnthonyMouse

          today at 8:52 AM

          A 10% performance reduction seems like a lot to be leaving on the table.

          • rayiner

            today at 10:02 AM

            Not really.

    • zozbot234

      today at 4:24 AM

      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.

    • washadjeffmad

      today at 1:56 AM

      Gaming isn't what people are using Mac Studios for. Thunderbolt also isn't a substitute for OCuLink.

      • rayiner

        today at 2:20 AM

        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

          today at 2:38 AM

          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

            today at 4:56 AM

            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

            today at 7:02 AM

            Apple Silicon has an integrated thunderbolt controller so that should have less latency than PCs that use a discrete thunderbolt controller.

        • izacus

          today at 8:23 AM

          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

        today at 8:29 AM

        Um, I have an M3 Ultra 512GB on my desk for development. Love me some Baldur’s Gate 3, everything turned up to 11…

  • aprilnya

    today at 1:06 AM

    - 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?

    • jltsiren

      today at 1:54 AM

      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

        today at 1:58 AM

        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

        • jltsiren

          today at 2:07 AM

          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

            today at 2:35 AM

            > Apple recently added support for InfiniBand over Thunderbolt.

            TIL:

            * https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3205-l...

            Or maybe I forgot:

            * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248644

        • Forgeties79

          today at 2:03 AM

          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

            today at 2:41 AM

            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.

    • pjmlp

      today at 6:52 AM

      To have lots of them plugged together, high end audio cards, electronics integrations, disks with having cables all over the place.

    • gizajob

      today at 7:11 AM

      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.

    • HeWhoLurksLate

      today at 1:43 AM

      but what about second GPU?

      • wtallis

        today at 7:25 AM

        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.

    • wpm

      today at 5:13 AM

      Video capture

      I/O expansion

      Networking

    • today at 4:24 AM

• tylerflick

  today at 1:44 AM

  > gone are the days of PCIe

  Thunderbolt is external PCIe.

  • eigenspace

    today at 9:43 AM

    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).

• oefrha

  today at 2:36 AM

  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

    today at 2:43 AM

    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.

• today at 4:22 AM

• angoragoats

  today at 1:55 AM

  > 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.

  • wtallis

    today at 5:42 AM

    > 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

      today at 9:18 AM

      > 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.

  • johnebgd

    today at 3:12 AM

    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.

  • hazz99

    today at 2:08 AM

    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.

  • GeekyBear

    today at 1:58 AM

    Thunderbolt is PCIe running over a cable.

    • labcomputer

      today at 5:10 AM

      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.

    • angoragoats

      today at 2:13 AM

      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.

  • sundvor

    today at 3:21 AM

    Yup the 4090 and SoundBlaster ZXR in my AM5 7800X3D system would both like to upvote your reply.

    • Arcanum-XIII

      today at 4:50 AM

      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.

      • Intermernet

        today at 5:25 AM

        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.

      • sundvor

        today at 7:37 AM

        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.

      • wpm

        today at 5:15 AM

        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

          today at 8:50 AM

          Sounds like a 9.5" mini rack could help with the stacking, see Geerling.

      • gizajob

        today at 7:13 AM

        Compared to video data and the speed the CPU is running at, audio trickles in at a snails pace.

• Lucasoato

  today at 12:40 AM

  Scarlett 2i2 has been amazing for me, I’d say unbeatable in terms of quality/price ratio.

• whalesalad

  today at 2:19 AM

  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

    today at 4:26 AM

    The latest M2-based Mac Pro did not take socketed memory AIUI.

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.

• gehsty

  today at 9:58 AM

  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.

• A_D_E_P_T

  today at 1:54 AM

  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

    today at 2:39 AM

    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.

  • 1W6MIC49CYX9GAP

    today at 10:10 AM

    Intel doesn't limit how much memory card makers can pair with their GPU. It's up to the card maker.

  • gehsty

    today at 10:01 AM

    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?

  • bigstrat2003

    today at 3:25 AM

    > 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.

    • gizajob

      today at 7:22 AM

      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.

    • HerbManic

      today at 5:04 AM

      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.

    • user34283

      today at 8:29 AM

      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?

• greggsy

  today at 8:53 AM

  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.

• vlovich123

  today at 2:00 AM

  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

    today at 2:06 AM

    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!

    • vlovich123

      today at 4:21 AM

      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.

    • aurareturn

      today at 2:59 AM

      Some people at Apple see it. That’s why they added matmul to M5 GPU and keep mentioning LMStudio in their marketing.

      • rudedogg

        today at 5:09 AM

        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

          today at 7:31 AM

          Huh? What local LLM apis? It uses Metal.

  • aurareturn

    today at 2:58 AM

    $280b and growing 70% YoY.

    $1t backlog in orders in next 2 years.

    • HerbManic

      today at 5:14 AM

      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

        today at 5:31 AM

        Just look at the price of H100 cloud rental prices. Demand is increasing.

• root_axis

  today at 3:16 AM

  Nah, Apple made the right choice. Nobody except a niche market of hobbyists is interested in running tiny quantized models.

  • gizajob

    today at 7:24 AM

    About the same niche market as the people who bought the Apple I, and we know where that went.

    • wtallis

      today at 7:35 AM

      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.

• Almondsetat

  today at 8:42 AM

  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

• kristopolous

  today at 6:53 AM

  this is what needs to come back with modern hardware and modern interconnect

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve

• bschwindHN

  today at 5:49 AM

  > They had the infrastructure and custom SoCs and everything. What a waste.

  What are they wasting, exactly?

• zer0zzz

  today at 7:06 AM

  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.

• zer00eyz

  today at 1:59 AM

  > 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).

  • JumpCrisscross

    today at 2:55 AM

    > 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.

    • jiggawatts

      today at 7:00 AM

      What "tooling" do you use to let AIs work unattended for long periods?

    • raincole

      today at 5:53 AM

      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

        today at 7:28 AM

        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.

      • today at 6:35 AM

  • root_axis

    today at 3:28 AM

    > 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

      today at 3:47 AM

      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

      • HerbManic

        today at 5:19 AM

        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.

      • kyboren

        today at 5:14 AM

        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

          today at 7:35 AM

          Of course they are! Both are important and will be around and used for different reasons

  • Forgeties79

    today at 2:05 AM

    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.

    • a1o

      today at 3:30 AM

      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.

    • zer00eyz

      today at 3:00 AM

      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?"

• etchalon

  today at 1:56 AM

  Nothing is a bigger market than the iPhone, let alone expensive niche machines.

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.

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.

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.

Pour one out for John Siracusa

• sgerenser

  today at 12:13 AM

  I guess not enough people bought the shirt: https://cottonbureau.com/p/4RUVDA/shirt/mac-pro-believe-dark...

  • bombcar

    today at 2:24 AM

    Is it strange that only now do I want the shirt?

    • brailsafe

      today at 5:06 AM

      I think we're all there with you :)

      • wpm

        today at 5:17 AM

        They better do another run.

        • brailsafe

          today at 5:53 AM

          Mac Pro... We Believed

• longislandguido

  today at 2:08 AM

  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

    today at 2:15 AM

    That is an interesting fact indeed!

    https://macdailynews.com/2012/06/12/rush-limbaugh-okay-apple...

• UqWBcuFx6NV4r

  today at 8:49 AM

  But what will we do without “this doesn’t work on intel macOS” corner!?

• jryio

  today at 1:21 AM

  If you're reading this, we're sorry John!

• kuekacang

  today at 6:37 AM

  F

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

  today at 9:46 AM

  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.

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?

• waz0wski

  today at 12:32 AM

  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

    today at 2:35 AM

    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

      today at 4:02 AM

      Are SMART attributes independently readable on that? (Or any multi-drive USB-C enclosures?)

  • KennyBlanken

    today at 5:44 AM

    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."

• m463

  yesterday at 10:33 PM

  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.

• macintux

  today at 1:56 AM

  My first non-Linux PC was a cheese grater, way overkill for my needs but served me well for many years.

Damn I was hoping they would build proper GPUs at some point.

I hope I can get a cheap one on Craigslist eventually, just for the novelty. It looks so cool.

• spot

  today at 12:27 AM

  [flagged]

  • jmgao

    today at 1:40 AM

    MCPRUE sells shameless ripoffs of the Mac Pro case, but with support for standard motherboard sizing, if you really want your PC to double as a cheese grater: https://www.mcprue.com/case

    • leohonexus

      today at 2:03 AM

      I own one and there's nothing shameful about it. It's basically CNCed to Apple's standards, just without the logo. The cool thing is since Studio Displays work on Windows too, with Thunderbolt motherboards you can have a setup that's visually the same as a Mac but is actually a PC.

      P.S. Does anyone know how well Studio Displays now work on Linux? The best I could get it to work was on Ubuntu, where it basically worked out of the fresh install. X11 KDE on Fedora was a close second. Couldn't get it working on Wayland whatsoever.

    • dd8601fn

      today at 1:55 AM

      $1,000 just for the case... ouch! (neat though)

      • shrinks99

        today at 2:21 AM

        I own one of these, it is amazingly well manufactured. Not cheap, but (with the exception of the power button) well made.

  • testing22321

    today at 12:57 AM

    Burn more power for a slower computer! That’ll shoe em.

    • angoragoats

      today at 2:09 AM

      A Ryzen 9800X3D is about 40% faster in single-core tests and the same speed to slightly faster at multi-core tasks, as compared to the M2 Ultra in the Mac Pro. In addition, the Ryzen computer would presumably be modular and allow for the user to choose their preferred configuration of memory, storage, GPU, etc, with options far exceeding those offered by Apple in its limited and non-user-upgradable machine. In addition, configuring the Ryzen machine with comparable specs to the base model Mac Pro (64GB of ram, 1TB of storage, and a low-end to midrange discrete GPU) would put you at a total system cost of something like 20-25% of the $6999 that the Mac Pro cost, even with today's inflated memory prices.

      I'm not sure if this is what the parent meant by "a real modern PC," but it would certainly be 1) faster and 2) vastly cheaper than the Mac. So at minimum, your assertion that it'd be slower is wrong.

      Depending on your configuration, you could likely also match the overall power consumption of the Mac as well, though yes, it is easily possible to exceed it. But the most likely way you'd exceed it is with a high-end GPU, which would vastly outperform the (fixed, non-upgradeable) GPU in the Mac.

      • hu3

        today at 2:35 AM

        Can confirm. I have a Ryzen 9800X3D with RTX 5070, 128GB of RAM and TBs of Gen 5.0 NVMes.

        Not only it is screamingly fast (the fastest on earth for some workloads), but I can upgrade it easily. And is dead silent too.

        The best thing is it runs native Linux and it just works.

        • angoragoats

          today at 2:42 AM

          And a 9800X3D is not even the fastest CPU out there, nor even the fastest CPU you could use with your specific motherboard. A 9950X3D is essentially two of the 9800X3Ds combined, and would be a drop-in replacement.

          • hu3

            today at 8:10 AM

            Wrong. See benchmarks. Many games and single-threaded workloads run faster on 9800X3D.

            There are various reasons for this, major one being that the 9800X3D has more L3 cache per thread than the 9950X3D.

            And also wrong that a 9950X3D is 2x 9800X3D combined. A quick glance would tell you that, since 9950X3D has 128MB of L3 cache shared between more threads while 9800X3D has 96mb for half the threads, so more L3 per thread.

            And most of the times, even when a 9800X3D loses to 9950X3D in games, it's usually within 1-4% margin for most games.

            It's a monster for games and some workloads.

            It's funny that people who blindly buy 9950X3D for gaming+office workloads without checking benchmarks often end up with similar or slower performance.

            Much smarter to use the price difference on other hardware to speedup other things such as faster NVMEs, efficient silent cooling, faster GPUs, etc.

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".

• wmf

  today at 12:54 AM

  The migration path is Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures (basically eGPU enclosures but you don't have to use a GPU).

  • eigenspace

    today at 9:58 AM

    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.

  • bigyabai

    today at 2:57 AM

    > but you don't have to use a GPU

    That's a cute way of saying that GPUs aren't supported.

• bigyabai

  yesterday at 9:29 PM

  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

    yesterday at 9:34 PM

    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

      today at 2:31 AM

      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

    yesterday at 9:56 PM

    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

      yesterday at 10:57 PM

      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

        today at 2:30 AM

        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

          today at 3:54 AM

          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.

• yesterday at 11:57 PM

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

  today at 3:49 AM

  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

    today at 5:24 AM

    > 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.

    • eigenspace

      today at 9:54 AM

      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.

    • lloeki

      today at 6:14 AM

      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

        today at 7:54 AM

        Apparently upgrading the SSD can be done, but it's a weird form factor and you need another Mac to restore it.

    • StingyJelly

      today at 7:44 AM

      >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.

  • today at 4:15 AM

• steve-atx-7600

  today at 4:13 AM

  Even the toaster appliance Mac’s had upgradeable ram and hard drives though. But it does seem like that to me also.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

  today at 2:26 AM

  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.

The only thing that is missing from the current Mac line up is a one rack unit machine.

• magarnicle

  today at 5:40 AM

  They had that with the previous gen mini, but the new ones are too tall now.

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.

Honestly the Mac Studio is the new Mac Pro, this makes more sense to me.

• therealmarv

  today at 1:49 AM

  but even that one looks kinda outdated when looking at latest M5 Max laptops.

  • jshier

    today at 2:27 AM

    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.

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.

• longislandguido

  today at 12:59 AM

  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

  today at 1:36 AM

  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

    today at 2:04 AM

    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

      today at 2:13 AM

      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

        today at 2:19 AM

        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.jpg

        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

          today at 8:38 AM

          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

    today at 2:07 AM

    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

      today at 2:15 AM

      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.

• __loam

  today at 12:57 AM

  The studio is also like 5x as fast as those machines.

  • lapcat

    today at 1:03 AM

    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.

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.

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

  today at 2:29 AM

  They have tried variations of this since time immemorial (we can argue about "price reasonablé") 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

    today at 3:16 AM

    WSJ recently did a thing about it but details were rather light

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.

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

  today at 3:14 AM

  They did come out with a new XDR. It’s just not 32”.

For AI Apple internally has rack mounted M chips but they wont sell them to the public.

Apple need to sort out their software.

Mac OS is a horrible experience.

• dwayne_dibley

  today at 8:36 AM

  Have you seen windows lately?

  (but yes, Apple seems happy to ship buggy software these days)

  • lwhi

    today at 8:47 AM

    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.

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.

I mean for the cost of the Mac Pro wheels you can get a Macbook Neo these days!

It is kind of a bummer they never supported Cuda/HIP GPGPU using those slots.

They also discontinued the 1000 dollars Pro Stand, apparently

• karel-3d

  today at 10:15 AM

  oh and those wheels

R.I.P. to the cheese grater

> 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.

• wpm

  today at 5:24 AM

  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.

• bombcar

  today at 3:07 AM

  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.

• kelnos

  today at 12:37 AM

  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

    today at 12:55 AM

    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.

• bigyabai

  today at 12:00 AM

  > 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

    today at 12:12 AM

    > 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...

    • wtallis

      today at 1:01 AM

      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.

    • bigyabai

      today at 12:21 AM

      This is the USB-C dongle argument all over again, but with a proprietary connector that a total of one (1) company uses.

      • dijit

        today at 2:10 AM

        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

          today at 3:10 AM

          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

            today at 3:46 AM

            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).

In other news, the Mac Pro Wheels Kit was also discontinued.

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/26/mac-pro-wheels-kit-disc...

Good, Mac Pro was fugly.

I like Apple when they make pretty stuff. Especially small, shiny, and quiet.

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.

The price to value for the Mac Pro kept going down. Mac Studio made more sense.

Another company would have killed it a long time ago. It lasted this long because it’s Apple.

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

  today at 4:54 AM

  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

    today at 8:36 AM

    >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".

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

  yesterday at 10:08 PM

  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

    yesterday at 10:21 PM

    And I still don't get it.

    • Amorymeltzer

      yesterday at 10:35 PM

      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

        today at 2:40 AM

        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

          today at 3:09 AM

          > 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

  yesterday at 10:51 PM

  Apple still sells a workstation-type machine: the Mac Studio.

  • pjmlp

    today at 6:34 AM

    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

      today at 7:43 AM

      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

        today at 7:59 AM

        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

          today at 10:15 AM

          [delayed]

  • wpm

    today at 5:26 AM

    It's not at all a workstation type machine. It's a Mac Mini with bigger SoCs and better cooling.

  • bigyabai

    today at 12:08 AM

    What is this, a workstation for ants?

    • badc0ffee

      today at 12:11 AM

      It's a pizza box, for a 6" pizza.

[dead]

[flagged]

• Lio

  today at 8:51 AM

  This is just silly. In what way is a $600 netbook their flagship product when then also ship wildly successful 128GB MacBook Pros and 256GB Mac Studios?

  I was more disapointed when they dropped the 512GB Mac Studio than I am the loss of the Mac Pro. My hope is that they'll launch something really useful at the WWDC to make up for that.

• michaelt

  today at 12:54 AM

  I'm pretty sure Apple's flagship product is the iPhone 17 Pro.

• chasingtheflow

  today at 12:47 AM

  Except by most all regards that product is great.

  • longislandguido

    today at 12:52 AM

    By "great" do you mean 8GB of non-upgradable soldered RAM in 2026?

    • kube-system

      today at 2:35 AM

      It's not like Apple soldered some plain old DDR5 to a PCB to be difficult:

      1. It's TSMC's InFO_POP, which has significant performance benefits.

      2. There weren't even any modules that existed for LPDDR until very recently. (and while the A18 was being designed, it didn't exist)

      3. The power/price/performance/thermals they are able to achieve with this configuration is not possible with socketed RAM. You are asking them to make the device worse

      Go pop open a Framework with an Ryzen AI Max processor -- you won't find socketed RAM. Technology has moved on. Math coprocessors and CPU cache aren't separate modules anymore either. AMD has even said they studied the possibility of LPCAMM for Strix Halo and found that even it wasn't good enough for signal integrity.

      • bigyabai

        today at 5:50 AM

        The "Mac memory is special" shtick is getting old. macOS is a heavy OS, 8gb is an objective liability to the SSD lifespan.

    • RulerOf

      today at 8:15 AM

      That device was explicitly made with "not enough" memory, because if it had enough, it'd cannibalize a significant portion of their higher-margin products' sales.

      I'd argue that if memory and storage were still customer-expendable, they wouldn't have even considered making this product.

    • macintux

      today at 1:59 AM

      You realize that most customer shopping for the cheapest computer they can find are not going to upgrade their RAM.

      And Apple is effectively committing to supporting 8GB computers with their OS upgrades for years to come.

      • ProllyInfamous

        today at 2:44 AM

        I picked up a 15" Macbook Air (M3) for $849 — clearance @costco early 2025.

        This model only has 8gb of RAM — which is fine for streaming videos/typing — it absolutely could not be my daily driver, but makes for good casual usage.

        Machines probably should ship with more than that (or a lighter operating system?), particularly when the RAM isn't upgradeable. I'll recon Apple supports at least two more macOS on these 8GB configurations.

        My favorite machine only has 4GB of RAM (Core2Duo Max, Win7Pro) and works good, albeit nothing modern.

    • testing22321

      today at 1:00 AM

      That handily edits multiple 4K streams

      • longislandguido

        today at 1:01 AM

        [flagged]

        • rogerrogerr

          today at 1:20 AM

          > simp: be excessively attentive or submissive to a person in whom one is romantically or sexually interested.

          This word does not appear to be in any way relevant. You do not have to buy a MacBook Neo, but approximately everyone else in the low-end laptop market will.

          If you think it is a bad product, go buy some Acer stock.

          • bigyabai

            today at 2:54 AM

            > but approximately everyone else in the low-end laptop market will.

            No, they won't. People repeat this, but Macs constitute a minority of the low-end market and will continue to for the foreseeable future.

            This has been the case when $400 Retina Intel Macbooks were flooding the used market; it was the case when Costco sold $700 M1 MBAs. If you cannot extrapolate what will happen with the $600 laptop, then I don't think you have payed attention to what the market is buying.

          • longislandguido

            today at 3:16 AM

            > but approximately everyone else in the low-end laptop market will

            This is delusion. The retail price point right now for comparable PC laptops is $429 and they ship with DOUBLE the RAM and storage (16GB, 512GB).

            For the same specs as the Neo we are talking < $350.

            There is NO market for this device. Apple is catering to the welfare crowd with this one, except anyone in that situation would opt for a PC at half the price.

            Like trying to sell a Cadillac with a park bench for seats to save money. It makes no sense.

            Bookmark this post, the Neo will be discontinued within two years. It will join the original MacBook on the scrap heap of Apple products that should have never been.

            • rogerrogerr

              today at 5:09 AM

              I have firsthand knowledge that at least one incumbent household name PC manufacturer is in a state of panic over the Neo. This is from an organization that would be predisposed to believing what you’re saying, but instead they’re revising internal forecasts and executives are freaking out.

              I have no interest in arguing further, it benefits me nothing. But sure, let’s revisit it in two years.

> 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.

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.