<story><title>The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/23770770/apple-mac-pro-m2-ultra-2023-review</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SilverBirch</author><text>I think it&amp;#x27;s a mistake to view the Apple silicon mac pro as some big new investment. They had one very simple purpose - they said the whole Apple line up needed to be Apple silicon, and that&amp;#x27;s what they delivered.&lt;p&gt;The truth is that Intel spent a lot of time  plugging away at all the different mechanisms that you could try to get performance, and one of those is high bandwidth peripheral interfaces. Apple hasn&amp;#x27;t got there yet, it doesn&amp;#x27;t have a chip with a tonne of transceivers on it that it can use to hook up a massive GPU, and to get there they need to not only get all the transceiver work sorted, they also need to build an entire software stack to deliver that performance. All to benefit the lowest revenue product in their line up chasing a sector that&amp;#x27;s not growing.&lt;p&gt;So what will happen? The same thing that happened with all of Apple&amp;#x27;s bad products- they&amp;#x27;ll continue to offer it for sale at incredibly high margins for eternity and never attempt to make it more competitive. Let me point you to the Mac Pro Trash can, it was almost immediately obvious that the product didn&amp;#x27;t deliver. What is the reasonable thing to do? Do a redesign as soon as possible! What did they do? Quote from Wikipedia:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;On September 18, 2018, the Mac Pro surpassed the Macintosh Plus&amp;#x27;s production life record for an unchanged Mac model, with the Plus having remained on sale unchanged for 1,734 days. It was discontinued on December 10, 2019, after being on sale unchanged for a record 2,182 days.&lt;p&gt;The new Mac Pro is going to be here for a very long time is my guess.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cstross</author><text>&amp;gt; So what will happen? The same thing that happened with all of Apple&amp;#x27;s bad products- they&amp;#x27;ll continue to offer it for sale at incredibly high margins for eternity and never attempt to make it more competitive.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s another thing Apple do with bad products, though. The original 13&amp;quot; Aluminum Macbook launched in November 2008. It was discontinued in June 2009, in favour of the 13&amp;quot; Macbook Pro, which offered a permanently built-in battery (the previous model had a removable battery), and dropped Firewire. &lt;i&gt;That&lt;/i&gt; stayed on sale, subject to regular spec bumps, until October 2012, when they bumped the screen to a retina display ...&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not an insider, just a long-term Apple watcher (been using Macs since 1991): what seems to happen is they used to get an internal goal to fill a niche in the product range by a certain date, and if the performance target isn&amp;#x27;t quite achievable they ship whatever they&amp;#x27;ve got -- then iterate on it, possibly with a model branding change.&lt;p&gt;The Mac Pro looks like a classic case of this: Tim Cook committed Apple to being 100% Apple Silicon across the range by the end of 2022, they missed, but they had to ship &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt; to keep the Mac Pro brand alive. So they shipped a turkey (a Mac Studio with PCI slots and a higher price tag).&lt;p&gt;What happens next is: either they ship the &lt;i&gt;real&lt;/i&gt; Apple Silicon Mac Pro in a year or two (with who-knows-what changes, but something to differentiate it from the top of the Mac Studio range other than price), or they admit defeat and kill the Pro range altogether, or maybe downgrade it to be the name of the top end Mac Studio.&lt;p&gt;But this model won&amp;#x27;t be available for more than two years, max.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/23770770/apple-mac-pro-m2-ultra-2023-review</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SilverBirch</author><text>I think it&amp;#x27;s a mistake to view the Apple silicon mac pro as some big new investment. They had one very simple purpose - they said the whole Apple line up needed to be Apple silicon, and that&amp;#x27;s what they delivered.&lt;p&gt;The truth is that Intel spent a lot of time  plugging away at all the different mechanisms that you could try to get performance, and one of those is high bandwidth peripheral interfaces. Apple hasn&amp;#x27;t got there yet, it doesn&amp;#x27;t have a chip with a tonne of transceivers on it that it can use to hook up a massive GPU, and to get there they need to not only get all the transceiver work sorted, they also need to build an entire software stack to deliver that performance. All to benefit the lowest revenue product in their line up chasing a sector that&amp;#x27;s not growing.&lt;p&gt;So what will happen? The same thing that happened with all of Apple&amp;#x27;s bad products- they&amp;#x27;ll continue to offer it for sale at incredibly high margins for eternity and never attempt to make it more competitive. Let me point you to the Mac Pro Trash can, it was almost immediately obvious that the product didn&amp;#x27;t deliver. What is the reasonable thing to do? Do a redesign as soon as possible! What did they do? Quote from Wikipedia:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;On September 18, 2018, the Mac Pro surpassed the Macintosh Plus&amp;#x27;s production life record for an unchanged Mac model, with the Plus having remained on sale unchanged for 1,734 days. It was discontinued on December 10, 2019, after being on sale unchanged for a record 2,182 days.&lt;p&gt;The new Mac Pro is going to be here for a very long time is my guess.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jbverschoor</author><text>Apple and others could just as well create an accelerator card with a bunch of M2s on it.&lt;p&gt;They could also create some sort of blade server.. they print their own cups in literally everything. Phone, laptops, headset, apple cinema displays. The production cost of an M1 is about $30.&lt;p&gt;Remember that the 5-year $1.5B contact with AWS will expire next year. They already have XCode cloud, and have enabled virtualization natively for a while&lt;p&gt;Either large Mac Pro based rack-servers or accelerators for rendering, transcoding, and AI&amp;#x2F;ML.&lt;p&gt;They could market those 10x$30 chips on a single board as something that is &amp;quot;10x&amp;quot; the power of the Mac Pro, at “only” $20000 a pop.&lt;p&gt;You can be very certain that NVDA did not get unnoticed, as Apple has the same capabilities, and sees a future in AI&amp;#x2F;ML.</text></comment>