I see no fumble. It was clear after the launch of Apple silicone that soc was what they were doing and the macpro wasn’t going to be the macpro of yesteryear.
The fail is Apple couldn’t do anything more with the system than what they did in the Studio. No more RAM, no more cores, no more speed (with all that cooling!). Even the PCIe slots aren’t properly supported, with only 16 lanes that must be shared among 4 slots.
Just checked Apple’s leadership team profiles on https://www.apple.com/leadership/. Did I miss something? I don’t see Mark Gurman’s profile anywhere on that site. Where does he sit in Apple’s leadership team that decides the execution of Apple’s product strategy?
Word is that Gurman, and other Bloomberg writers, get paid a bonus for articles that move a company's stock price. He and others there have a financial incentive to make provocative statements (remember the now entirely debunked Big Hack article that Bloomberg never retracted?) to try and affect the stock price. By couching them as hypotheticals they avoid the hits their credibility ought to take.
The bottom line is that anything published by Bloomberg must be taken with a very large grain of salt.
So in other words, Apple Insider is spreading misinformation.
They're reporting on rumors, which is what they do. They marked it as possible, not likely. So, no, your mischaracterization of what Apple Insider is doing doesn't hold water.
Ah, you’re thinking of Mac OS Rumors. This here is “Apple Insider” - implying that the reporting is from credible inside sources with inside knowledge- not merely rumors or speculation- especially from known stock manipulators. I think my characterization holds water just fine.
All this fuss over non-expandable GPU and RAM, what if it turns out that the overall architecture is so good that people's old thinking is just false? What if the Mac Pro delivers incredible performance beyond what anyone imagined, without the need for user expansion?
Look at the pipeline, folks. Wear glasses if your'e struggling with myopia. None of this is about Apple ending the Mac Pro line.
The current iteration of the Mac Pro is all about getting it moved to Apple silicon. At this point, all of the available Mac versions are now using Apple silicon. Remember that everything from MacBook Air to Mac Pro runs on the same MacOS. At some point in the not-too-distant future, there will be a new version of MacOS that will not run on an Intel Mac. At that point, someone who's paid >$7K for an Intel Mac Pro within the previous two or three years would be very unhappy to be first on the list with a machine that won't support the newest OS. So more than anything else, this year was the deadline to stop selling new Intel Macs. If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that the 2027 version of MacOS will stop supporting Intel Macs. Maybe 2028.
So for right now, someone with a fairly new MP that does all the things probably won't choose to upgrade to this year's MP. For someone who needs a workhorse now and this year's MP can meet their needs, they can go ahead and buy it knowing that it will have access to continued OS upgrades for at least another 5-7 years, so they'll either be able to hang onto it, or if they want to upgrade it will retain significant resale value during that time.
Look at the pipeline, folks. Wear glasses if your'e struggling with myopia. None of this is about Apple ending the Mac Pro line.
The current iteration of the Mac Pro is all about getting it moved to Apple silicon.
It's fabulous Apple was able to finish off the Intel contract. It's ugly that Apple couldn't do better with Apple Silicon and the new Mac Pro, which is more of an expensive placeholder than an attractive solution. This is not the future Apple led us all to expect. 4-year-old AMD processors kick the 2023 Mac Pro's butt. Oh, yeah, AMD uses more watts. ok, swell.
Mark Gurman is an absolute dipshit. The guy doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to anything Apple. He just talks a big talk and changes his story every other week so that his track record always seems great. In the end he doesn't really know all that much. IDK why these sites give him so much attention.
Apple needed a stopgap Mac Pro with Apple Silicon and the M2 SoC. The M3 version will be the real Mac Pro that Apple wanted to release but it just wasn't ready and Apple couldn't afford to keep waiting on transitioning the Mac Pro from Intel as the Intel model was embarrassing to them performance wise, more so than what they released.
Only Apple has the customer data to tell them what's "worth it" or not in terms of R&D and production investment, but with the high-end Mac Studio now taking at least some of what was already a very limited market for the Mac Pro, I'm not surprised to read that its future is on thin ice. It would probably take a big investment of both money and human talent to create a next gen Mac Pro that is significantly faster and more expandable than Mac Studio and I'm not sure the market for such a machine is big enough to justify that investment for a sprawling, $3 trillion company.
On the other hand, they found the time to engineer some ridiculously expensive wheels for the Pro and I'm sure the market for a 'low end tower' never even went away and they still refused to produce such a machine.
The closest they got was with the new Mini.
You can thank Jony Ive for that most likely. Thats the stupid shit he was more concerned about at Apple that IMO put Apple down the wrong road with its product lineup across the board.
Come to think of it, Apple's M series chips make more sense for portable Macs such as MacBooks, minis and Studios. It makes zero sense for MacPro. The road map for the current MacPro seems like an after thought. It could've been Mac Studio Pro in the form of Mac Studio x2 the height.
… I'm not sure the market for such a machine is big enough to justify that investment for a sprawling, $3 trillion company.
Apple is at this point where not only they can, but also MUST produce some inspirational, flagship, loss-leader products.
That product is called the Vision Pro. Even at a debut price of $3K a pop, Apple will lose a ton of money if it's not a long-running success. And anyone dismissing it at this point, before anyone can really understand its capabilities, is just baselessly blathering into the ether. There's also a long history of Apple's biggest successes not being critically well-received when they debuted. iPhone? "No business person will ever use a touch screen keypad." And where is Blackberry now? iPad? "Just a big iPhone--who needs that?" Apparently countless millions of people needed it and Apple now owns the tablet market. AirPods? Apple was lambasted for ditching the headphone jack in favor of wireless. Macbook Air? Once the glow of Jobs's manilla envelope shtick dimmed, the MBA was ridiculed as an expensive toy--underpowered with poor battery life and a slow HD. I could go on, but you get the idea. Dismissing Apple products early has made fools out of many people.
I don't know any more than anyone else does about whether the Vision Pro WILL be successful--but it is a very big, inspirational swing at a new form of computing. And IF it succeeds, its potential is exponentially greater than anything Apple could achieve with a new Mac Pro.
Small businesses don't want "cloud" (somebody else's computer) garbage, they want servers.
...and this was probably true in 2011. Owning and operating servers is absolutely insane for a small business in 2023.
Those three Apple engineers, who formed Nuvia which later got bought out by Qualcomm for 1.2 billion (a nice payday) probably put a bug in Apple's ear, Apple at some point in the future will probably build some type of server using Apple Silicon chips (too much money left on the table), but before they do, they’re are two things they want to do first? release the Apple Vision Pro, and attain GPU parity with the competition at some point in the future during the (M4,M5 generations).
… I'm not sure the market for such a machine is big enough to justify that investment for a sprawling, $3 trillion company.
Apple is at this point where not only they can, but also MUST produce some inspirational, flagship, loss-leader products.
That product is called the Vision Pro. Even at a debut price of $3K a pop, Apple will lose a ton of money if it's not a long-running success. And anyone dismissing it at this point, before anyone can really understand its capabilities, is just baselessly blathering into the ether. There's also a long history of Apple's biggest successes not being critically well-received when they debuted. iPhone? "No business person will ever use a touch screen keypad." And where is Blackberry now? iPad? "Just a big iPhone--who needs that?" Apparently countless millions of people needed it and Apple now owns the tablet market. AirPods? Apple was lambasted for ditching the headphone jack in favor of wireless. Macbook Air? Once the glow of Jobs's manilla envelope shtick dimmed, the MBA was ridiculed as an expensive toy--underpowered with poor battery life and a slow HD. I could go on, but you get the idea. Dismissing Apple products early has made fools out of many people.
I don't know any more than anyone else does about whether the Vision Pro WILL be successful--but it is a very big, inspirational swing at a new form of computing. And IF it succeeds, its potential is exponentially greater than anything Apple could achieve with a new Mac Pro.
The lucky few who got a chance to do a hands on demo came out of the demonstration babbling like babies, I think when people get a hands on demo at the Apple stores, there will be a recalibration on what you can use it for in your computing life, and the first generation is as big physically as it’s ever going to be, as time goes on, it will get better smaller and faster, and it through iteration will eventually be able to fit into a frame of glasses many many years in the future.
There may be a long wait for the next Mac Pro to surface, if another one comes at all, with a report offering that the desktop Mac model is on thin ice.
The newest Mac Pro made the eventual switch over to Apple Silicon, but didn't receive the usual acclaim and welcome that other Mac Pro releases received after launch. There's a chance that Apple's fumbled Mac Pro update could lead to it giving up on the model for the moment.
As part of a discussion of the M3 chip roadmap, Mark Gurman mentioned in the "Power On" newsletter for Bloomberg about the Mac Pro. In explaining which models should receive the M3 Ultra chip, Gurman says the list is the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro, "if Apple continues making those."
The aside to the reader isn't a good sign for fans of the Mac Pro, which was previously seen as the most powerful and flexible Mac for professionals to use as a workstation.
With the introduction of the Apple Silicon model, some elements of the Mac Pro's utility became less impressive, in part due to the existence of the Mac Studio. With both the Mac Pro and Mac Studio able to use Apple Silicon, and with the Mac Studio being generally cheaper to purchase, it made the Mac Pro a hard purchase for anyone just wanting high levels of performance.
The other big factor picked up in reviews and comparisons is that the PCIe expansion options of the Mac Pro are really limited. The Intel version enabled select graphics cards to be installed and used, but that is not available in the Apple Silicon version at all.
Indeed, if Apple Silicon did hypothetically support discrete GPUs, there was also the argument of buying a Mac Studio and an external GPU enclosure instead of spending extra for the Mac Pro.
It is possible to expand the Mac Pro, albeit with other types of PCIe cards and a limited amount of storage. The user-serviceable memory of the Intel version was also culled for Apple Silicon, severely limiting the amount of memory that the Apple Silicon-based model could hold.
If Apple were to continue making the Mac Pro, it would need to address the major shortcomings that were key to the model's existence for it to become a success. For the moment, if Gurman's comment turns out to be a true indicator, Apple may step back from the Mac Pro for a long time to regroup, or potentially give up on the Mac Pro entirely in its current form.
Just checked Apple’s leadership team profiles on https://www.apple.com/leadership/. Did I miss something? I don’t see Mark Gurman’s profile anywhere on that site. Where does he sit in Apple’s leadership team that decides the execution of Apple’s product strategy?
There may be a long wait for the next Mac Pro to surface, if another one comes at all, with a report offering that the desktop Mac model is on thin ice.
The newest Mac Pro made the eventual switch over to Apple Silicon, but didn't receive the usual acclaim and welcome that other Mac Pro releases received after launch. There's a chance that Apple's fumbled Mac Pro update could lead to it giving up on the model for the moment.
As part of a discussion of the M3 chip roadmap, Mark Gurman mentioned in the "Power On" newsletter for Bloomberg about the Mac Pro. In explaining which models should receive the M3 Ultra chip, Gurman says the list is the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro, "if Apple continues making those."
The aside to the reader isn't a good sign for fans of the Mac Pro, which was previously seen as the most powerful and flexible Mac for professionals to use as a workstation.
With the introduction of the Apple Silicon model, some elements of the Mac Pro's utility became less impressive, in part due to the existence of the Mac Studio. With both the Mac Pro and Mac Studio able to use Apple Silicon, and with the Mac Studio being generally cheaper to purchase, it made the Mac Pro a hard purchase for anyone just wanting high levels of performance.
The other big factor picked up in reviews and comparisons is that the PCIe expansion options of the Mac Pro are really limited. The Intel version enabled select graphics cards to be installed and used, but that is not available in the Apple Silicon version at all.
Indeed, if Apple Silicon did hypothetically support discrete GPUs, there was also the argument of buying a Mac Studio and an external GPU enclosure instead of spending extra for the Mac Pro.
It is possible to expand the Mac Pro, albeit with other types of PCIe cards and a limited amount of storage. The user-serviceable memory of the Intel version was also culled for Apple Silicon, severely limiting the amount of memory that the Apple Silicon-based model could hold.
If Apple were to continue making the Mac Pro, it would need to address the major shortcomings that were key to the model's existence for it to become a success. For the moment, if Gurman's comment turns out to be a true indicator, Apple may step back from the Mac Pro for a long time to regroup, or potentially give up on the Mac Pro entirely in its current form.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! That's a good one! Please, explain yourself. We'd love to hear it. I'll get the popcorn.
I'd also like to know who is a suitable replacement for Tim Cook. Every single time someone brings up Tim needs to go, nobody has an answer for who should replace him. It's just a statement and then crickets.
As an end-user and Creative Pro, I have become somwwhat thick skinned over Apple’s treatment of my Professional class - i.e. workin’ class designers. I am using two ancient but still wide shouldered classic cheegraters, one pretty aggressively upgraded. But the time to replace them IS coming, mostly due to OS and software incompatibilities, so I’ve been paying attention to Apples upper tier offerings. Not working for Pixar, ILM, Lucasfilm or NASA - the current incarnation of the Mac Pro is RIGHT out. And of course the beauty of the cMP is that you can do a LOT of upgrading and expansion, and do it yourself. This was was a huge plus of the iconic design. But Apple has abandoned that entire paradigm with SoC, right down to SSDs soldered to motherboards, or bespoke SSD modules. I am, like everyone else, impressed by the advances in performance and efficiency represented by the M series chips. But less impressed by the “sealed black box” philosophy that forces users to pre-buy against future need. When the time comes, I expect the Mac Studio (or its successor) will be the maximum a workin’ class Creative Pro can afford. The demise of the Mac pro, no matter how speculative, whoild not much affect my professional class.
I wanted one. I was hopeful they would do what they said, but instead they shoved out a ridiculous unchanged product. It was a major letdown.
I would like to see a “halo” Mac, that shows off just how fantastic Apple can be.
Because they fell flat on their face with this, it gives the impression that they aren’t inspired and that those in charge think a more commodity approach is fine. That’s not the company I want Apple to be.
I have supported/purchased Apple products because the company and the engineers went beyond profit and loss. That excitement has kept me buying more than I absolutely need, because it helps get me inspired to reach further.
I think they should abandon the Mac Pro and revive the Mac Server with drive trays, slots for IO and redundancy. That would sell considering the power efficiency of the M series chips.
and serve an even lower market than the Mac Pro? Apple cannot compete in the ARM server market.
I think they should abandon the Mac Pro and revive the Mac Server with drive trays, slots for IO and redundancy. That would sell considering the power efficiency of the M series chips.
Absolutely!!! I am still running 2009 Xserves because there is no viable Apple replacement. - Rackmount - Redundant Power Supplies - Hot Swap drives - Expansion Slots - 1U/2U/3U options would be nice
All this fuss over non-expandable GPU and RAM, what if it turns out that the overall architecture is so good that people's old thinking is just false? What if the Mac Pro delivers incredible performance beyond what anyone imagined, without the need for user expansion?
Comments
Yes, this possibility still exists.
"7 Afterburner cards"
The current iteration of the Mac Pro is all about getting it moved to Apple silicon. At this point, all of the available Mac versions are now using Apple silicon. Remember that everything from MacBook Air to Mac Pro runs on the same MacOS. At some point in the not-too-distant future, there will be a new version of MacOS that will not run on an Intel Mac. At that point, someone who's paid >$7K for an Intel Mac Pro within the previous two or three years would be very unhappy to be first on the list with a machine that won't support the newest OS. So more than anything else, this year was the deadline to stop selling new Intel Macs. If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that the 2027 version of MacOS will stop supporting Intel Macs. Maybe 2028.
So for right now, someone with a fairly new MP that does all the things probably won't choose to upgrade to this year's MP. For someone who needs a workhorse now and this year's MP can meet their needs, they can go ahead and buy it knowing that it will have access to continued OS upgrades for at least another 5-7 years, so they'll either be able to hang onto it, or if they want to upgrade it will retain significant resale value during that time.
Apple needed a stopgap Mac Pro with Apple Silicon and the M2 SoC. The M3 version will be the real Mac Pro that Apple wanted to release but it just wasn't ready and Apple couldn't afford to keep waiting on transitioning the Mac Pro from Intel as the Intel model was embarrassing to them performance wise, more so than what they released.
I don't know any more than anyone else does about whether the Vision Pro WILL be successful--but it is a very big, inspirational swing at a new form of computing. And IF it succeeds, its potential is exponentially greater than anything Apple could achieve with a new Mac Pro.
I'd also like to know who is a suitable replacement for Tim Cook. Every single time someone brings up Tim needs to go, nobody has an answer for who should replace him. It's just a statement and then crickets.
I am still running 2009 Xserves because there is no viable Apple replacement.
- Rackmount
- Redundant Power Supplies
- Hot Swap drives
- Expansion Slots
- 1U/2U/3U options would be nice