All Hail the Mac Studio as the de facto King of the Hill!
The question is, is Apple abandoning the market segment that would do things like load up a Mac Pro with GPU cards? Or are they envisioning that Apple Silicon is going to be able to handle the needs of that market?
Years ago, they had a special task force where they gathered Pro users together to provide feedback. Perhaps, Apple should do the same to see if there is such a market that demands for Pro hardware with tons of GPU.
That’s a bit sad if true. I hope interconnect advances will still let them make a chip beyond Ultra size.
Apple “abandoned” that sector when it released the only Apple Silicon Mac Pro with the M2 Ultra. Its was basically an M2 Ultra Mac Studio with some extra PCI type slots.
However, the PCI type sockets in that Mac Pro had limited uses which did not include GPUs, and the eGPUs supported by Intel Macs weren’t supported on Apple Silicon either.
So unless you have an Intel Mac in general with an eGPU or an Intel Mac Pro, there’s no way to use a 3rd party GPU.
Edit and the Mac Pro with the same M2 Ultra was significantly more expensive than the comparable Mac Studio, for very little benefit other than accommodating extra drives and the hobbled PCI cards.
Supposedly they’re still working with Pro’s to understand how they’re using Mac Hardware.
You’ve gotta wonder what’s in it for them though.
Financially Mac Pro sales are a fraction of a percent and likely don’t add up to much compared to the rest of Apple’s business. Those people that didn’t need the expansion have saved themselves £500 and bought the Mac Studio instead.
From a trickle down perspective, by continuing the Mac Pro, I don’t believe they’re bring much to the rest of the line, in reality it’s a trickle up from iPhone to all other devices.
I remember reading comments/articles by some video & music professionals, when the apple silicon Mac Pro was announced, saying they needed more than 192GB of ram. It’s likely some of them had to switch to Windows.
Today they might have the option of a Mac Studio with 512 GB of ram. But I doubt if many pros would still be waiting to see if Apple decides to build another Mac Pro.