Talking of Apple and Pro Macs... It amazes me that macOS itself hasn't had its RAW capability updated to read Sony A7IV RAW files yet. I installed a new dev Beta 12.3 yesterday in a VM, and it can't read them yet either. LUCKILY, Adobe RAW and Capture One programmers were on the ball, and both can read the files.
If all you want out of the OS is an appliance that supports everything out of the box it could do, provided for you, you might even have a valid complaint.
Apple (like any OS design worth bothering with for such things) has implemented the OS as a platform with a certain more than reasonable amount of basic functionality, and it supports extension of that functionality by design, because it is, in fact, a platform designed to be extensible. This is NOT unique to MacOS. This also makes sure there are opportunities for third-party developers and advancements made by everyone in all the realms it is intended to be used.
Vendors that create codec implementations may choose to either make that available to all other applications that use the OS-provided Core Media and other frameworks, or keep that functionality only available within the context of their specific applications. This is by design both for how the OS works as well as the third-party applications.
MacOS (and every OS I’ve used, which is quite a few throughout time and space) is NOT meant to provide all functionality you could ever want out of the box, by design: that’d invariably be derided as being “bloat” and anti-competitive. It also has the nature, historically, of greatly limiting sales of machines where only the original seller determines what is released: ask about the TI 99/4 series computers and how well THAT worked out, where they removed all chances of a sane third-party ecosystem, as one example of what should have been a general-purpose computer.
All those high-end codecs cost money to license. Most codecs cost money to license. Most users don’t need to pay for the privilege of using pro-level codecs. If you wait long enough, perhaps those pro-level codecs will be cheap or free to license, likely once something “better” comes along.
Interesting that there is no space grey option for the studio or display. Ye ol’ silver is to be the sole “pro” color? Interesting.
The ultra chip is pretty awesome. Can’t wait for future versions to come in other form factors.
One bummer is it seems like Apple’s aesthetics sort of nosedived on this design. The Porte on the front look a bit haphazard like on a PC.
I think the 2013 model was a nicer and more iconic design, they could have reused this for the Studio, maybe shorter in height but they have to mount them sideways in a server environment. One of the design choices for the Studio was to have a minimal footprint and the marketing photos of the Studio show it positioned under the display so that it uses less desk area. This is likely one of the reasons for the ports on the front as it's harder to get to the back when the computer is tucked under the display.
A 2019 style in a smaller form factor would have been nice, even though it would use more desk space:
It wouldn't need the handles at the top and it could have a single fan at the front like in the 2019 that blows through a heatsink. It doesn't need ports at the front either. Apple (Jony Ive) put ports on the front of the old Mac Pros so it's not like it's a new thing but it doesn't look good with cables coming from the front and people who need easier access to the ports can buy a hub:
Internally they could allow for two M.2 SSDs on top of internal soldered SSD so people could buy 1TB and add dual 8TB M.2. Maybe a cube is the design they will use for the Mac Pro.
Here's my idea for a Mac Pro replacement that's user modifiable. Unfortunately for many people, I believe the only replaceable parts will come from Apple but they would (might) allow the Mac Pro to be actually upgradeable where it counts.
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The number of connections and the tiny scale of everything involved including the maximum signal length makes the backplane idea very improbable at best. If there’s anything resembling a backplane, it would be something factory-assembled. Remember the mention on the video of over 10,000 signals and connections?
I totally understand the amount of connections. I have to wonder whether Apple could build a vertical stack of M1 Maxes to sell as a pluggable stack into the motherboard. What connections actually come out of the SoC? How many?
I watched this video earlier today that goes into both that and what they’ve already done: https://youtu.be/8Yz1pqX_eC0 “Apple’s M2 Ultra DUO Mac Pro will be LEGENDARY! (Leaks).
I have no connection with that other than being a viewer. As explained on the video, how the “interposer” is done is the simplest possible way during manufacturing to join two dies: never cut them to start with!
In theory, Apple could have a single socketed SoC on the main board that has the relatively few other chips that are required, but in practice, it may lock them down too much in designing where pins go versus where they’re at on the die making it limited to a single chip generation design, so it’d make it slightly less expensive for repairs, but soldered down chips tend to be more reliable in systems, so it’s a tradeoff.
If all the system RAM and GPU and all the other things now on the M1 series remains on that die, that greatly reduces the number of pins needed for other than ground and power; a large portion of pins on such BGA sockets tend to be either one of those, as electrical needs for impedance dictates where they’re needed, and you can’t provide all the power the chip needs through too small of a number.
I would guess all the Apple Silicon SoCs have a rather small number (relatively speaking) of pins because of their integration, and lower power requirements than AMD/Intel chips on average. Keep in mind AMD/Intel BGA chips have sockets for over 1000 pins for many of their sockets historically.
I’m not persuaded Apple will make their boards with sockets, as I’m expecting they’ve already got final board yields high enough that adding sockets into the mix just adds expense.
My reason for putting the SoCs into sockets is so the SoC can be upgraded without upgrading everything else. This keeps the new Mac Pro user configurable, something many current Mac Pro users complain about. The typically need to keep them longer than consumers to pay off their obscenely high cost. Keep it upgradeable and the SoC can be switched out gaining additional power without buying everything again. Of course, the SoC has just about everything in it so you're buying a new computer anyway.
There is an assumption that Mac Pro users are complaining about things but Apple knows how the votes are being cast with the purchases. Often people talk about the Mac Pro not offering the highest performance but Apple compares the Studio to the most popular Mac Pro configurations, which are the mid-range models.
All Apple needs to offer in the Mac Pro is an Ultra Duo. That will be competitive with most high-end PCs.
That can fit in a cube like the above design. If it needs PCIe expansion, they can add an expansion box outside for the few people who will use it. GPUs aren't going to be needed by most users when they have 40TFLOPs internally.
I suspect they will use a dual stack M1 Ultra. A design like having 4 boards with an Ultra chip each and have one as the controlling board would be powerful but a configurable design has to be practical. It's not likely that people would swap single boards in and out and mismatch them. If they upgrade all of the units, they have effectively bought a new machine and there's not much chance they can sell the old boards.
A Mac Pro with an M1 Ultra Duo would likely cost around $10k. There's not much point in selling $3-4k boards with Ultras on them each when someone can easily buy a new $10k model and resell the old one for $5k+. Because every Mac is based on the same chips, they can all be refreshed on the same cycle, every model can get an M1, M2, M3. No skipping years like with Xeon chips.
WWDC launch, Mac Pro Cube with M1 Ultra 128GB for $5999 and M1 Ultra Duo 256GB $9999.
It can have a PCIe 5 connector for external expansion and a box that supports MPX modules. Most users won't need them when there's so much performance internally but it allows for edge cases and for optical connections if Apple doesn't bundle this by default.
It’s not even that apple shouldn’t put ports on the front. It’s useful in a pinch. But it’s the WAY they were added. Like they didn’t even consider the aesthetics of it. At the minimum, they could have oriented to ports horizontally and created one thin flowing line where all the ports go. Kind of surprised to see such an unfortunate PCesque slapdash approach.
The studio still looks nice and if I weren’t holding out for something else, I’d buy it. But it could have easily looked a whole lot better with in simple decision.
9secondkox2 said:It’s not even that apple shouldn’t put ports on the front. It’s useful in a pinch. But it’s the WAY they were added. Like they didn’t even consider the aesthetics of it. At the minimum, they could have oriented to ports horizontally and created one thin flowing line where all the ports go. Kind of surprised to see such an unfortunate PCesque slapdash approach.
The studio still looks nice and if I weren’t holding out for something else, I’d buy it. But it could have easily looked a whole lot better with in simple decision.
I'm certain that lots of thought went into the design they chose. It wasn't some random thing decided at the last minute. Maybe they found that people tend to hold the plug vertically or maybe they didn't want some moron trying to insert a USB-C plug into the card slot.
How something looks is important, but not the most important factor. Frankly the "fat mini" form factor is an ugly design, period. But Apple (sometimes rightly) gets roasted when they roll out a radical design for their computers.
Just pointing out a few things. The Studio with the M1 Ultra SOC does not have a 512 GB SSD option, it literally is 2x the M1 Max version, so, it starts at 1 TB. the price in the table S/b $3999, not $7999 - that is a full on price, which includes a beefed up M1 ultra with a 64 core GPU, 128 GB of ram an 8TB SSD. A little confusing as presented,
Here's my idea for the replacement Mac Pro.
1. Stays modular with an UltraFusion backplane.
2. Uses socketed M1 Ultra SoC cards to allow replacement of SoC when things like video encode/decode requirements change. No reason to re-purchase everything, just the things that have major updates.
I like your general thinking but can't quite imagine the price of that Mac Pro. There may not be enough total cash in circulation.
However, take your #2 and build that into Apple Studio display and you get an iMac "bigger" + Screen "all in one" that can evolve the guts when macOS makes them "long in tooth"... long before the monitor tends to wear out. In other words, when your iMac no longer can upgrade macOS, take it into an Apple store and buy the latest-greatest Apple tech guts at the time on a #2 card that- through the card slot- links to the monitor, port hub, on/off button and power supply.
iMac tends to be a great value buy up front but the waste at the end is terrible because when any one part has to go, it ALL has to go. This idea would make parts that can last much longer than the computing guts be used for their natural lifetimes.
You might get upwards of 3 "brand new iMac" upgrades that way before the monitor actually wears out. The big benefit is no more throwing out a perfectly-good screen when the tech guts are made obsolete by macOS upgrades. I don't foresee the tech downsides to this concept. I suppose future M(whatever) may need some other kind of cooling system hardware but perhaps Apple can anticipate that possibility to try to somewhat cover that base in the first gen.
In defence of the Mac Pro it’s using chips from 2019 that Apple really should’ve updated by now seeing as their replacement has been out for a year already!
Having said that the Mac Studio will cover most professionals, can’t wait to see the Apple Silicon based Mac Pro. I’m guessing quad M1 Max and perhaps a cheeky 8X M1 Max option.
This keeps the new Mac Pro user configurable, something many current Mac Pro users complain about. The typically need to keep them longer than consumers to pay off their obscenely high cost.
No, that’s backwards. It is the hobbyist consumer, without a real need for the Mac Pro, who needs to keep the Mac Pro longer because of its cost.
A pro with good business sense buys equipment that makes back its cost during a normal amortization period, like 3 to 5 years. The pro does not need to keep a Mac Pro longer because the pro who buys a Mac Pro already knows how it will pay for itself. Theirs is the kind of business that pays $20,000 for a camera and another $15,000 for the gear that is required to support the camera so that it does its job flawlessly (specialized cage, mounts, matte box, lenses…), a few thousand $ worth of lights, audio production equipment, $3000 for a lens, etc. All of this makes sense for them because they can charge tens of thousands of dollars for a single job. The Mac Pro just slots right into this pricing structure and could be paid for in a job or two.
There is one think Apple mentioned in the introduction of the Mac Studio, but never elaborated on. They said it was modular. Beyond that one comment, nothing else was mentioned. It was like a little nugget. Is it possible they are holding back a feature that wasn’t ready yet to reveal once they get the kinks out?
What if multiple Mac Studios could connect via Thunderbolt at some point like previous Macs could to share processing power for Logic Pro and I believe FCP? What if modular refers to stacking Mac Studios or optional modules with different configurations to build your preferred setup? What if you could offload apps to a different Mac Studio for processing while controlling everything using Universal Control?
There is one think Apple mentioned in the introduction of the Mac Studio, but never elaborated on. They said it was modular. Beyond that one comment, nothing else was mentioned. It was like a little nugget. Is it possible they are holding back a feature that wasn’t ready yet to reveal once they get the kinks out?
What if multiple Mac Studios could connect via Thunderbolt at some point like previous Macs could to share processing power for Logic Pro and I believe FCP? What if modular refers to stacking Mac Studios or optional modules with different configurations to build your preferred setup? What if you could offload apps to a different Mac Studio for processing while controlling everything using Universal Control?
When they said modular, they meant: "a modular system in terms of a separate display and computer so that over time, users can upgrade their compute resources without the need to upgrade their display". This is a quote from Tom Boger, Apple VP of Mac and iPad product marketing, and pretty definitive.
For your distributed computing ideas, that's more of a software thing, or a market thing. There has to be enough users of desktop clusters before they would really put resources into, especially one where there is no setup and there is an easy GUI to use it. People do do distributing computing with Macs, with Xcode builds, transcoding, rendering, and a plethora of Unix CLI workflows, but it takes quite a bit of expertise. Apple has Xcode Cloud, which is a distributed Xcode build system running on a cluster, so Apple has put effort into that at least, but it is not something Joe user can easily do.
If say, someone is needs to transcode 50 movies from 4K to 720p to put on their iPad for a vacation trip. That user can use multiple computers to speed the process up. Would be nice if Ethernet over TB4 was plug and play, and in Handbrake or whatever, user or Handbrake itself would automatically know how to distribute jobs across a network. Or perhaps a user wants to run 50 web browser tabs on one computer, 50 browser tabs on another computer, and it's all displayed on the same monitor. How would a user manage which computer a browser tab runs on? There would need to be a menu option like "Run this browser tab on..." to set it. Lots of software work to do.
Comments
Apple (like any OS design worth bothering with for such things) has implemented the OS as a platform with a certain more than reasonable amount of basic functionality, and it supports extension of that functionality by design, because it is, in fact, a platform designed to be extensible. This is NOT unique to MacOS. This also makes sure there are opportunities for third-party developers and advancements made by everyone in all the realms it is intended to be used.
Vendors that create codec implementations may choose to either make that available to all other applications that use the OS-provided Core Media and other frameworks, or keep that functionality only available within the context of their specific applications. This is by design both for how the OS works as well as the third-party applications.
MacOS (and every OS I’ve used, which is quite a few throughout time and space) is NOT meant to provide all functionality you could ever want out of the box, by design: that’d invariably be derided as being “bloat” and anti-competitive. It also has the nature, historically, of greatly limiting sales of machines where only the original seller determines what is released: ask about the TI 99/4 series computers and how well THAT worked out, where they removed all chances of a sane third-party ecosystem, as one example of what should have been a general-purpose computer.
All those high-end codecs cost money to license. Most codecs cost money to license. Most users don’t need to pay for the privilege of using pro-level codecs. If you wait long enough, perhaps those pro-level codecs will be cheap or free to license, likely once something “better” comes along.
How something looks is important, but not the most important factor. Frankly the "fat mini" form factor is an ugly design, period. But Apple (sometimes rightly) gets roasted when they roll out a radical design for their computers.
However, take your #2 and build that into Apple Studio display and you get an iMac "bigger" + Screen "all in one" that can evolve the guts when macOS makes them "long in tooth"... long before the monitor tends to wear out. In other words, when your iMac no longer can upgrade macOS, take it into an Apple store and buy the latest-greatest Apple tech guts at the time on a #2 card that- through the card slot- links to the monitor, port hub, on/off button and power supply.
iMac tends to be a great value buy up front but the waste at the end is terrible because when any one part has to go, it ALL has to go. This idea would make parts that can last much longer than the computing guts be used for their natural lifetimes.
You might get upwards of 3 "brand new iMac" upgrades that way before the monitor actually wears out. The big benefit is no more throwing out a perfectly-good screen when the tech guts are made obsolete by macOS upgrades. I don't foresee the tech downsides to this concept. I suppose future M(whatever) may need some other kind of cooling system hardware but perhaps Apple can anticipate that possibility to try to somewhat cover that base in the first gen.
Having said that the Mac Studio will cover most professionals, can’t wait to see the Apple Silicon based Mac Pro. I’m guessing quad M1 Max and perhaps a cheeky 8X M1 Max option.
Also ECC memory is a big plus for the Mac Pro
A pro with good business sense buys equipment that makes back its cost during a normal amortization period, like 3 to 5 years. The pro does not need to keep a Mac Pro longer because the pro who buys a Mac Pro already knows how it will pay for itself. Theirs is the kind of business that pays $20,000 for a camera and another $15,000 for the gear that is required to support the camera so that it does its job flawlessly (specialized cage, mounts, matte box, lenses…), a few thousand $ worth of lights, audio production equipment, $3000 for a lens, etc. All of this makes sense for them because they can charge tens of thousands of dollars for a single job. The Mac Pro just slots right into this pricing structure and could be paid for in a job or two.
What if multiple Mac Studios could connect via Thunderbolt at some point like previous Macs could to share processing power for Logic Pro and I believe FCP? What if modular refers to stacking Mac Studios or optional modules with different configurations to build your preferred setup? What if you could offload apps to a different Mac Studio for processing while controlling everything using Universal Control?
For your distributed computing ideas, that's more of a software thing, or a market thing. There has to be enough users of desktop clusters before they would really put resources into, especially one where there is no setup and there is an easy GUI to use it. People do do distributing computing with Macs, with Xcode builds, transcoding, rendering, and a plethora of Unix CLI workflows, but it takes quite a bit of expertise. Apple has Xcode Cloud, which is a distributed Xcode build system running on a cluster, so Apple has put effort into that at least, but it is not something Joe user can easily do.
If say, someone is needs to transcode 50 movies from 4K to 720p to put on their iPad for a vacation trip. That user can use multiple computers to speed the process up. Would be nice if Ethernet over TB4 was plug and play, and in Handbrake or whatever, user or Handbrake itself would automatically know how to distribute jobs across a network. Or perhaps a user wants to run 50 web browser tabs on one computer, 50 browser tabs on another computer, and it's all displayed on the same monitor. How would a user manage which computer a browser tab runs on? There would need to be a menu option like "Run this browser tab on..." to set it. Lots of software work to do.