Apple had a M1 Mac Pro, but decided to wait for M2 Extreme
Mark Gurman provided some details about unreleased Apple products in a new interview, suggesting a M1 Mac Pro isn't coming, and the Mac mini won't see a redesign.
The rumored new Mac Pro with M1 has been reportedly scrapped
Gurman normally reports for Bloomberg where he provides leaks and rumors from his insider sources. For example, he recently shared details about the rumored "Pro" Apple Watch Series 8 in his "Power On" newsletter.
The interview was hosted by YouTube channel Max Tech, where Gurman discussed some of the exaggerated controversies that the interviewers originally started surrounding the M2 MacBook Air. As the interview continued, Gurman shed some light on unreleased Apple products that won't be released.
"I don't think there will be a redesign to the Mac mini," said Gurman. "I actually don't know where the rumors of a redesign came from. I think those are also going to be spec bumps."
Rumors of a new Mac mini originated from the controversial Jon Prosser. His leak history was accurate for some time, but has come into question thanks to a few major misses like a flat-sided Apple Watch or an iPhone without a camera bump.
After the Mac Studio was revealed, it seemed that Apple would no longer announce a redesigned Mac mini. A Mac Pro with M1, however, remained in the rumor mill until very recently.
The rumored new Mac mini design may never be announced
"They also had an M1 Mac Pro, ready to go months ago," continued Gurman. "But I guess they scrapped that to just wait for the M2 pro version."
Rumors had originally assumed the Mac Pro would be announced during WWDC with an M1 variant, perhaps higher than the M1 Ultra. That didn't pan out, and now, with the existence of the M2 processor, the Mac Pro may not arrive for a long time.
Gurman believes the Mac Pro with "M2 Extreme" could be announced by the end of 2022, but wouldn't be released until mid-2023 at the earliest. Apple could also announce new iPad Pros with M2 and more in the same time period.
The full interview is available on the Max Tech YouTube page. Gurman shares repeated information about future AirPods and Apple Watch models and the state of Apple given the economy.
Read on AppleInsider
The rumored new Mac Pro with M1 has been reportedly scrapped
Gurman normally reports for Bloomberg where he provides leaks and rumors from his insider sources. For example, he recently shared details about the rumored "Pro" Apple Watch Series 8 in his "Power On" newsletter.
The interview was hosted by YouTube channel Max Tech, where Gurman discussed some of the exaggerated controversies that the interviewers originally started surrounding the M2 MacBook Air. As the interview continued, Gurman shed some light on unreleased Apple products that won't be released.
"I don't think there will be a redesign to the Mac mini," said Gurman. "I actually don't know where the rumors of a redesign came from. I think those are also going to be spec bumps."
Rumors of a new Mac mini originated from the controversial Jon Prosser. His leak history was accurate for some time, but has come into question thanks to a few major misses like a flat-sided Apple Watch or an iPhone without a camera bump.
After the Mac Studio was revealed, it seemed that Apple would no longer announce a redesigned Mac mini. A Mac Pro with M1, however, remained in the rumor mill until very recently.
The rumored new Mac mini design may never be announced
"They also had an M1 Mac Pro, ready to go months ago," continued Gurman. "But I guess they scrapped that to just wait for the M2 pro version."
Rumors had originally assumed the Mac Pro would be announced during WWDC with an M1 variant, perhaps higher than the M1 Ultra. That didn't pan out, and now, with the existence of the M2 processor, the Mac Pro may not arrive for a long time.
Gurman believes the Mac Pro with "M2 Extreme" could be announced by the end of 2022, but wouldn't be released until mid-2023 at the earliest. Apple could also announce new iPad Pros with M2 and more in the same time period.
The full interview is available on the Max Tech YouTube page. Gurman shares repeated information about future AirPods and Apple Watch models and the state of Apple given the economy.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Probably 3nm.
So yeah I’m also wondering why Apple would put a whole lot of effort into a radical redesign of the current Mac mini. They just have to find a way to keep it up to date while still slotting it into a price-performance gap that doesn’t infringe on the base Max Studio. The next mini will be the Air of the Mac product line.
The "Ultra" is and will still likely be the low end of the Pro configuration. The higher end will effectively be 2 Ultra modules or maybe "extreme" as Gurman calls it. I think the real question is whether Apple is able to make it user scalable with something like Apple branded video cards, etc. To your point, the GPU in the M1 Ultra didn't scale to its potential. Looks like a hardware / engineering problem. That's likely why they scrapped the M1 based Mac Pro machine. Hopefully, this will be corrected for the M2 series of Ultra / Extreme chips.
Also, no the Studio is not a stop gap. It's more like a "mini Pro" in lieu of a 27" iMac.
tht said:
I agree that they likely need some form of PCI expansion, but I don't agree that it needs 3.5 HDD options at this point. Especially for a high performance pro machine. If you were talking about a "prosumer" type of box, I might agree, but not for the high end pro machines.
All of the Mac range of computers need to be released at the same time at each SOC M1, M2, M3 level upgrade, overlapping isn’t going to work. Apple had trouble with Intel’s schedule, it’s a shame now that Apple is in charge they are having internal marketing release trouble with themselves with their own chip.
One more thing the performance of the M2 at low wattage is utterly ridiculous when compared to the Intel and AMD chips, where are the SERVERS? What is Apple waiting for Jerry Jones? The Fourth season of Ted Lasso? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf9sjtv3LYs Incredible!.
It has a 150W power supply but draws at most 40W. They just reused the Intel design, which was intended for 120W of power.
It could easily be half the size it is now, even if they decide to add a Pro chip. If it's just half the height, it doesn't do a whole lot but if it has a smaller footprint, that's beneficial.
When leakers get predictions wrong, they often say that the product was scrapped. In 2010, Gurman said Apple would release a 15" Air, then said it had manufacturing issues and would launch in 2012. Then it just doesn't get mentioned again.
It was clear when the Max chip launched that it only had one edge connector to add another chip so the only option they had was 2x Ultra chips with a different connection than UltraFusion. I don't see how an M1 Mac Pro was ready to go then scrapped, it sounds like a made up story. The leakers only had details of the Mac Studio a week before launch so it sounds more like they just didn't know anything about what was happening.
A 3nm Ultra will be in the region of 40TFLOPs. Two of these is 80TFLOPs, same as an Nvidia 4090 and this exceeds the 2019 Mac Pro. This would fit into an 8" Cube. The majority of Mac Pro buyers are in the middle price range and this would meet that price point while offering more performance than the $20k+ 2019 Pro. Significantly more performance for video editing.
Generally, it works like this. You have a team building the new technology for things like the CPU and GPU cores. Those cores are used with the most simplistic and highest volume chips the company makes. Why? They are easier to debug and they produce the highest rate of return for the company. The A series chips will always be the leading indicator for where Apple is going with their technology. Then, they scale this out to bigger and better chips like the Mx, Mx Pro, Mx Ultra, etc. Meanwhile, concurrently, they're working on their next technology for their CPUs and GPUs. On occasion, you might get something like media encoders showing up on a later M series chip first just because that's when the technology was ready.
As for servers, Apple is not in the server business and they don't sell their chips to others to use. The server market will eventually move away from Intel, but it largely has to happen on the desktop first. Why? Because people develop on the desktop and then deploy to the cloud. Right now, the cloud is driven by the popularity of the desktop architectures, despite the obvious advantages of moving to ARM based solutions.
The 2019 Mac Pro industrial design is very good imo. Just continue using it and only change the internal design in accordance to the expansion architecture they want to have. There are things they need to do to be competitive with a Mac Pro. Putatively, a product in the workstation market that can both go on top of desks and in racks, and would be able to address a wide range of workflows. So, >1 TB RAM capacity, large internal storage capacity, and flexibility to cover different types of work. I think it needs to continue to have 8 PCIe slots, and PCIe 4 is the minimum for a big box in 2023. How Apple enables large >1 TB memory and 40 to 60 PCIe lanes with their chip, memory and IO architecture has been a subject for debate for awhile.
The "easy" solution is to not offer >1 TB of RAM, but only 256 GB (with two M1 Ultras connected together), and to only have something like 20 PCIe 4 lanes for PCIe slots, or perhaps no PCIe slots at all. Like an uber Mac Studio. I don't think they can sell that and everyone will recognize it as a downgrade from the 2019 model. They may try, but I think it will fail. They tried the highly focused workstation product strategy with 2013 Mac Pro, and the 2017 iMac Pro, and it wasn't very successful. The 2022 Mac Studio is like this too, but perhaps has the saving grace of starting at $2000. The Mac Pro can't be a vertical product where it basically is a high end FCP machine.
I have half a thought that they should create a specialized RAM slot. Something with 400 GByte/s bandwidth, and can go up to 2 TB of RAM. It would be like the MPX slots where it is effectively 2 PCIe x16 slots in series, but architected only for main memory, with lower latency and higher bandwidth. It would have a heatsink on it like the Mac Pro Afterburner card. With the Mac Studio being an integrated, vertical product. If it was able to support the same expansion modules as the Mac Pro, it would have in driving down costs for both machines. SSDs are also heading down the path of needing active cooling, so an SSD card with a heatsink will be inevitable too. So, an SSD PCIe card that looks like an Afterburner card seems inevitable too.
It seems likely that one thing that will carry over from M1 is the M1 Max as a building block. The M1 Ultra was two M1 Max fused together. The M2 Ultra will be two M2 Max fused together, and the M2 "Extreme" will be four M2 Max fused together.
On the other hand, the relationship of the M1 Pro to the M1 Max was never clear to me. I remember speculation that it was a sort of byproduct, a cut-down M1 Max that had failed somehow, but could still be salvaged. I don't know enough about the fabrication process to judge that claim. It didn't seem quite right to me.
I hold out hope that the M2 Pro will find its way into the iMac and the new Mac Mini (6x6") as an option, along with the M2.
Then the MacBook Pro would be M2 Pro and M2 Max. The Mac Studio would be M2 Max and M2 Ultra. The Mac Pro would be M2 Ultra and M2 Extreme.
Apple’s SSDs on the iMac Pro, 2019 Mac Pro, and the Mac Studio all already use replaceable flash carts. They don’t need heatsinking so much as electrical isolation.