Rumored Mac Pro & Mac Studio aren't dead -- but neither are now expected at WWDC

AppleInsider

A very reliable leaker claims that WWDC 2023 will not see the long-delayed Apple Silicon Mac Pro, and that the Mac Studio will not be refreshed until it can have an M3 processor.

Apple's current Mac Pro

In an update to his previous claim about MacBook Pro models coming out at WWDC 2023, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has spoken of the delays to the desktop models MacRumors podcast.

Apple has confirmed that a Mac Pro is coming, and Gurman says he still expects Apple to release an updated Mac Pro during 2023.

But he says the New Mac Pro is at least unlikely to be at June's developer conference. Related to this, Gurman expects that Apple has pushed back the Mac Studio both until an M3 version is possible, to avoid it taking sales away from the Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

While standing by his claims about MacBook releases, Gurman also said that the 15-inch MacBook Air was originally supposed to launch in 2022. He believes that this means that when the time comes for a refresh to the smaller 13-inch MacBook Air, that model could get the M3 processor sooner than its larger sibling.

Gurman also spoke of the forthcoming Apple AR headset, and said he expects that both it and the next few generations of it, will each have a two-hour battery life. The headset has variously been rumored to feature a virtual keyboard of some description, and Gurman says he expects a "finicky... in-air-typing" system.

The headset is persistently rumored to be unveiled at WWDC, but that would reportedly mean Apple announcing it before its own engineers think it should.

WWDC runs from June 5, 2023, through June 9, 2023, and as ever the major announcements will be in Tim Cook's keynote presentation on the first day.

Read on AppleInsider

narwhal

PREDICTION: MacBook Air 15, the last of the M2 Macs, will release at WWDC and will be a top-seller due to its lower price and bigger screen. The rest of the Mac lineup will wait for M3.

mikethemartian

It figures since it is the only new product I have interest in.

jamescude

The Mac Pro becomes even more of a niche product with the Mac Studio out there. The Studio offers more than enough power for most use cases and the need for PCI cards is rarer than ever. 

Too bad- it’s awesome to have gobs of power but with the insane efficiency of Apple Silicon it’s no longer necessary. You can have your cake and eat it already.

9secondkox2

JamesCude said:

The Mac Pro becomes even more of a niche product with the Mac Studio out there. The Studio offers more than enough power for most use cases and the need for PCI cards is rarer than ever. 

Too bad- it’s awesome to have gobs of power but with the insane efficiency of Apple Silicon it’s no longer necessary. You can have your cake and eat it already.

The nfortunatelyhe Ultra in the Studio is handicapped due to design flaw. So it doesn’t live up to anywhere near its potential. 

An M2 Ultra is likely too hot to makes sense. So it waits for M3. Should get a revision or 2 prior to launch of big screen iMac and Mac Pro. 

mikethemartian

JamesCude said:

The Mac Pro becomes even more of a niche product with the Mac Studio out there. The Studio offers more than enough power for most use cases and the need for PCI cards is rarer than ever. 

Too bad- it’s awesome to have gobs of power but with the insane efficiency of Apple Silicon it’s no longer necessary. You can have your cake and eat it already.

It might not be necessary for most people but for physics/engineering, medical research, financial/economics modeling applications it is essential to have systems not constrained with SoC trade offs.

curtishight

A fine gentleman once told me with a warm smile: “There comes a point in the life of every product when you shoot the engineer and ship it!”

I'm content trusting Tim to let John and Johny live.

thadec

narwhal said:

PREDICTION: MacBook Air 15, the last of the M2 Macs, will release at WWDC and will be a top-seller due to its lower price and bigger screen. The rest of the Mac lineup will wait for M3.

With a 15 inch screen no way is it going to have a lower price than either the $999 or the $1199 MBA. The only thing that could reduce the price is its using a TSMC 5 process that is now legacy, with everything else but certain x86 PC parts now at 4nm (and Apple at 3nm). 

animill

9secondkox2 said:

JamesCude said:

The Mac Pro becomes even more of a niche product with the Mac Studio out there. The Studio offers more than enough power for most use cases and the need for PCI cards is rarer than ever. 

Too bad- it’s awesome to have gobs of power but with the insane efficiency of Apple Silicon it’s no longer necessary. You can have your cake and eat it already.

The nfortunatelyhe Ultra in the Studio is handicapped due to design flaw. So it doesn’t live up to anywhere near its potential. 

An M2 Ultra is likely too hot to makes sense. So it waits for M3. Should get a revision or 2 prior to launch of big screen iMac and Mac Pro. 

What design flaw? I own one and it’s been a reliable beast for Redshift and C4D, but Adobe products just don’t feel snappy with it. Please link so I can research. 👍

thadec

JamesCude said:

The Mac Pro becomes even more of a niche product with the Mac Studio out there. The Studio offers more than enough power for most use cases and the need for PCI cards is rarer than ever. 

Too bad- it’s awesome to have gobs of power but with the insane efficiency of Apple Silicon it’s no longer necessary. You can have your cake and eat it already.

Sorry, but this isn't even close to being true. The workstation and small server markets were already large before the boom in data science, ML and AI, and now with the LLM stuff it is going to get even bigger. Then there are the traditional use cases mentioned by @mikethemartian - physics/engineering, medical research, financial/economics modeling applications - to which we can also add CAD, architecture, animation, VFX etc. A lot of those require the most RAM and best GPUs that you can throw at them (for parallel processing, not actual graphics). In some cases integrated approach makes things worse. Discrete GPUs come with their own memory. While Apple's integrated CPU, GPU and RAM approach makes certain things faster and reduces power consumption, it creates bottlenecks when both the CPU and GPU are trying to access the same memory pool. And that is with 192 GB RAM not being nearly enough anyway. 

That being said, I have left several comments on here to this effect: a Mac Pro is whatever Apple calls a Mac Pro. The first iPhone had a 3.5" screen, 128 MB RAM, a single core RISC SOC and the original plan was no app store with an emphasis on HTML5 apps. Look at an iPhone 14 Pro Max by comparison. Also, compare the original iPod to the iPod Touch. The original Mac Mini to the M2 Pro Mac Mini. The original Apple TV to the current one. The iMac G3 to the current iMac. And so on. 

Apple can openly concede that the old Xeon W-based Mac Pro was a failure - too big, too noisy, too expensive, had crazy power/cooling requirements, was rarely updated, sold in much lower volumes than workstations from HP, Lenovo, Dell etc. - and the concept is being scrapped. And they can market the new Mac Pro as a innovative computing segment with use cases and markets that they define. 

Why do this? Because frankly ... they don't have a choice. First, Intel has made up a lot of ground in a very short time. Second, the best workstations no longer have Intel Xeon W inside anyway. They have AMD Threadripper. Would even an M3 Extreme Mac Pro outperform the AMD Threadripper 7000 that we are going to get in September? If so, it will only be due to the 7000 still being on a 5nm process. Meaning that when the 3nm Threadripper 8000 comes out in early 2025? Apple won't be able to compete with general purpose Intel and AMD workstations on CPU, GPU or RAM. So, position it as a special purpose device that is better for the things that Apple claims in the ways that Apple says that it is. 

narwhal

thadec said:

With a 15 inch screen no way is it going to have a lower price than either the $999 or the $1199 MBA. The only thing that could reduce the price is its using a TSMC 5 process that is now legacy, with everything else but certain x86 PC parts now at 4nm (and Apple at 3nm). 

I didn’t mean to suggest it would be cheaper than a MacBook Air 13. But it should be cheaper than MacBook Pros 14 and 16. Previously Apple charged a premium for >13” laptop displays.

saarek

thadec said:

JamesCude said:

The Mac Pro becomes even more of a niche product with the Mac Studio out there. The Studio offers more than enough power for most use cases and the need for PCI cards is rarer than ever. 

Too bad- it’s awesome to have gobs of power but with the insane efficiency of Apple Silicon it’s no longer necessary. You can have your cake and eat it already.

Sorry, but this isn't even close to being true. The workstation and small server markets were already large before the boom in data science, ML and AI, and now with the LLM stuff it is going to get even bigger. Then there are the traditional use cases mentioned by @mikethemartian - physics/engineering, medical research, financial/economics modeling applications - to which we can also add CAD, architecture, animation, VFX etc. A lot of those require the most RAM and best GPUs that you can throw at them (for parallel processing, not actual graphics). In some cases integrated approach makes things worse. Discrete GPUs come with their own memory. While Apple's integrated CPU, GPU and RAM approach makes certain things faster and reduces power consumption, it creates bottlenecks when both the CPU and GPU are trying to access the same memory pool. And that is with 192 GB RAM not being nearly enough anyway. 

That being said, I have left several comments on here to this effect: a Mac Pro is whatever Apple calls a Mac Pro. The first iPhone had a 3.5" screen, 128 MB RAM, a single core RISC SOC and the original plan was no app store with an emphasis on HTML5 apps. Look at an iPhone 14 Pro Max by comparison. Also, compare the original iPod to the iPod Touch. The original Mac Mini to the M2 Pro Mac Mini. The original Apple TV to the current one. The iMac G3 to the current iMac. And so on. 

Apple can openly concede that the old Xeon W-based Mac Pro was a failure - too big, too noisy, too expensive, had crazy power/cooling requirements, was rarely updated, sold in much lower volumes than workstations from HP, Lenovo, Dell etc. - and the concept is being scrapped. And they can market the new Mac Pro as a innovative computing segment with use cases and markets that they define. 

Why do this? Because frankly ... they don't have a choice. First, Intel has made up a lot of ground in a very short time. Second, the best workstations no longer have Intel Xeon W inside anyway. They have AMD Threadripper. Would even an M3 Extreme Mac Pro outperform the AMD Threadripper 7000 that we are going to get in September? If so, it will only be due to the 7000 still being on a 5nm process. Meaning that when the 3nm Threadripper 8000 comes out in early 2025? Apple won't be able to compete with general purpose Intel and AMD workstations on CPU, GPU or RAM. So, position it as a special purpose device that is better for the things that Apple claims in the ways that Apple says that it is. 

You’re right about performance, the Threadripper will no doubt be faster, but it will also consume far more power for said performance.

I wonder if Apple is cooking up a method of multiple ultra class SoC in the same system. Imagine 5 daisy chained M3 Ultras (or even better an unannounced Ultra Max) in the Mac Pro.

fidonet127

This WWDC by all rumors seems oddly hardware centric. 

VR/AR glasses, this would be the place to show them off as you need developers to get on board. 

The Air?????? Yes professionals do use it, and they are updating the processor, but what really ground breaking thing needs to announced at WWDC? Could still be. 

The Studio needs an update and the Mac Pro is overdue. They should announce something. The high end professionals still need the Mac Pro with tons of processing power and memory. The Studio doesn’t replace the Mac Pro for those users. The Studio is needed for the Prosumers and lower needs Professionals. 

animill

I think Apple is over-thinking the Mac Pro. The niche user-group (not small, just specialized) doesn’t need the fastest data lane interconnects, they want lots of them allowing for PCIE technology to be added to their beasts. Yes they want fast machines, killer fast, but real modularity is king. Don’t try to maximize the Mx to permit crazy fast interconnections at the loss of lanes, open it up to lots of lanes.

The Mac Studio is the perfect DCC machine, so don’t mess with it (except add some pizzaz please). Let the king of Macs have the modifiable tower, with ooodles of expansion and RAM slots even if it costs a few TB/s in interconnect bandwidth.

Just ship the damned thing!

9secondkox2

AniMill said:

9secondkox2 said:

JamesCude said:

The Mac Pro becomes even more of a niche product with the Mac Studio out there. The Studio offers more than enough power for most use cases and the need for PCI cards is rarer than ever. 

Too bad- it’s awesome to have gobs of power but with the insane efficiency of Apple Silicon it’s no longer necessary. You can have your cake and eat it already.

The nfortunatelyhe Ultra in the Studio is handicapped due to design flaw. So it doesn’t live up to anywhere near its potential. 

An M2 Ultra is likely too hot to makes sense. So it waits for M3. Should get a revision or 2 prior to launch of big screen iMac and Mac Pro. 

What design flaw? I own one and it’s been a reliable beast for Redshift and C4D, but Adobe products just don’t feel snappy with it. Please link so I can research. 👍

A memory buffer bottleneck (Translation Lookaside Buffer). 

The Ultra is quick, since the Max is quick, but it’s nowhere near as quick as it should/could be. 

Of course it’s a bummer when you buy something and find this stuff out later. But that’s the way it is. 

It’s a widely known issue. Just Google it. 

Thankfully, Apple is aware and has already resolved this in m2. So when the M3 Ultra (and greater) chips arrive, they’ll be singing at full potential. 

macxpress

I wish I could get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be an "expert" in Apple rumors like Ming-Ci Kuo or the dipshit from Bloomberg and just throw shit at the wall everyday in hopes that one thing will stick. Let's be honest, nobody knows when these new products are coming out. They're out when they're out and anyone who actually believes anything they say are just being foolish. 

I bet sometime within the next week or two they'll either be back on for WWDC or they'll announce it as being release late this year. They can change their mind as much as they want so they're always right. 

edited April 2023

macxpress

9secondkox2 said:

AniMill said:

9secondkox2 said:

JamesCude said:

The Mac Pro becomes even more of a niche product with the Mac Studio out there. The Studio offers more than enough power for most use cases and the need for PCI cards is rarer than ever. 

Too bad- it’s awesome to have gobs of power but with the insane efficiency of Apple Silicon it’s no longer necessary. You can have your cake and eat it already.

The nfortunatelyhe Ultra in the Studio is handicapped due to design flaw. So it doesn’t live up to anywhere near its potential. 

An M2 Ultra is likely too hot to makes sense. So it waits for M3. Should get a revision or 2 prior to launch of big screen iMac and Mac Pro. 

What design flaw? I own one and it’s been a reliable beast for Redshift and C4D, but Adobe products just don’t feel snappy with it. Please link so I can research. 👍

A memory buffer bottleneck (Translation Lookaside Buffer). 

The Ultra is quick, since the Max is quick, but it’s nowhere near as quick as it should/could be. 

Of course it’s a bummer when you buy something and find this stuff out later. But that’s the way it is. 

It’s a widely known issue. Just Google it. 

Thankfully, Apple is aware and has already resolved this in m2. So when the M3 Ultra (and greater) chips arrive, they’ll be singing at full potential. 

Yeah it looked like the M1 series was having issues with scaling. The Ultra wasn't as fast as it should have been. Definitely sounds like a design flaw but oh well it's a 1st gen M series chip so kinda to be expected. M2 at least with Pro and Max series seems to fix that. I'm sure M3 will be even better. 

9secondkox2

macxpress said:

9secondkox2 said:

AniMill said:

9secondkox2 said:

JamesCude said:

The Mac Pro becomes even more of a niche product with the Mac Studio out there. The Studio offers more than enough power for most use cases and the need for PCI cards is rarer than ever. 

Too bad- it’s awesome to have gobs of power but with the insane efficiency of Apple Silicon it’s no longer necessary. You can have your cake and eat it already.

The nfortunatelyhe Ultra in the Studio is handicapped due to design flaw. So it doesn’t live up to anywhere near its potential. 

An M2 Ultra is likely too hot to makes sense. So it waits for M3. Should get a revision or 2 prior to launch of big screen iMac and Mac Pro. 

What design flaw? I own one and it’s been a reliable beast for Redshift and C4D, but Adobe products just don’t feel snappy with it. Please link so I can research. 👍

A memory buffer bottleneck (Translation Lookaside Buffer). 

The Ultra is quick, since the Max is quick, but it’s nowhere near as quick as it should/could be. 

Of course it’s a bummer when you buy something and find this stuff out later. But that’s the way it is. 

It’s a widely known issue. Just Google it. 

Thankfully, Apple is aware and has already resolved this in m2. So when the M3 Ultra (and greater) chips arrive, they’ll be singing at full potential. 

Yeah it looked like the M1 series was having issues with scaling. The Ultra wasn't as fast as it should have been. Definitely sounds like a design flaw but oh well it's a 1st gen M series chip so kinda to be expected. M2 at least with Pro and Max series seems to fix that. I'm sure M3 will be even better. 

Pretty much. Apple came out of nowhere with m1, swinging for the fences. The Max was a nice surprise. The Ultrawas Apple really going in on the whole industry so they can beforgiven for a design hiccup what’s scary for everyone else is they e resolve that while still greatly improving their SOCs. M3 series is going to light things up. 

foregoneconclusion

macxpress said:

9secondkox2 said:

AniMill said:

9secondkox2 said:

JamesCude said:

The Mac Pro becomes even more of a niche product with the Mac Studio out there. The Studio offers more than enough power for most use cases and the need for PCI cards is rarer than ever. 

Too bad- it’s awesome to have gobs of power but with the insane efficiency of Apple Silicon it’s no longer necessary. You can have your cake and eat it already.

The nfortunatelyhe Ultra in the Studio is handicapped due to design flaw. So it doesn’t live up to anywhere near its potential. 

An M2 Ultra is likely too hot to makes sense. So it waits for M3. Should get a revision or 2 prior to launch of big screen iMac and Mac Pro. 

What design flaw? I own one and it’s been a reliable beast for Redshift and C4D, but Adobe products just don’t feel snappy with it. Please link so I can research. 👍

A memory buffer bottleneck (Translation Lookaside Buffer). 

The Ultra is quick, since the Max is quick, but it’s nowhere near as quick as it should/could be. 

Of course it’s a bummer when you buy something and find this stuff out later. But that’s the way it is. 

It’s a widely known issue. Just Google it. 

Thankfully, Apple is aware and has already resolved this in m2. So when the M3 Ultra (and greater) chips arrive, they’ll be singing at full potential. 

Yeah it looked like the M1 series was having issues with scaling. The Ultra wasn't as fast as it should have been. Definitely sounds like a design flaw but oh well it's a 1st gen M series chip so kinda to be expected. M2 at least with Pro and Max series seems to fix that. I'm sure M3 will be even better. 

Per the article below, the M1 Ultra does have twice the performance of an M1 Max for CPU while the GPU is more like 40% to 80% of the M1 Max depending on use.

https://www.engadget.com/m1-ultra-benchmarks-upscaled-video-143024262.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAJyvyZn46gzAtB4gfOuQkL-X26_bmsrwLcXz3gT3Y7gnBydg4rHLSaSfwL8QM5gqeHvP1hcJXvMQF1FR21QaVKV39rO8C2mjf3GfOUa9p4t8b1zEg84e_DLzirXx4_hs0R7SET7IPeesl_P75aTLTTtSwt7VQj1SQWBaE3lrhId8

"The M1 Ultra does best when its hardware accelerators can kick in. These are the parts of the chip built to speed up specific tasks, namely video rendering and AI processing. In a test processing ten 8K video clips at once, the M1 Ultra did the job in just 29 seconds when its accelerators were able to help out. This was about twice as fast as the PC we were testing, despite it having a 16-core AMD 5950X processor and Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti graphics card."

sdw2001

I don’t think it’s complicated.  Apple is going to release an absolute monster of a pro machine.  It’s going to be targeted at true professionals in video, audio, animation, design, etc.  It’s going to be very expensive.  Apple is likely waiting based on economic trends. 

zimmie

Xcode Cloud is running on amd64. As far as those of us outside Apple can tell, it's on rackmount Mac Pro units (definitely appears to be Xeon W processors). The Mac Pro is their last current amd64 product. It doesn't make sense to use their old processor architecture for their shiny new remote compilation and testing system.

I would be shocked at this point if Apple doesn't announce Xcode Cloud moving to aarch64 at WWDC. That implies an ARM Mac Pro or a rackmount ARM server, even if only for their internal use. It may be announced for some date in the future, but it will be announced and previewed at least.

thadec said:

... The first iPhone had a 3.5" screen, 128 MB RAM, a single core RISC SOC and the original plan was no app store with an emphasis on HTML5 apps. ...

People keep saying the original plan was no app store, but that was never true. It was crystal clear from the moment people started poking around inside them that the plan was to allow native applications in the future, but the system wasn't yet organized enough to let other people in. They pushed web applications simply because the phone had a competent browser and could run them before the internal cleanup was done.