atonaldenim

Penzi said:

Looking forward to seeing if this works on the upcoming M4/5 Mac Studio. And the pricing/timing on an 8TB SSD…

From the expandmacmini.com website:

Where are the 4TB and 8TB options?

Currently, the maximum storage available for the M4 Mac Mini through Apple’s official channels is 2TB. The 4TB and 8TB configurations are not available for the M4 Mac Mini, as they require different NAND chips, which are only found in the Mac mini M4 Pro variant. The M4 Pro has a completely different PCB and power management IC design.

Installing 4TB or 8TB NAND chips into the M4 Mac Mini would involve using non-Apple NAND chips and making significant modifications to the power management circuits. For now, we believe it’s best to avoid such modifications to ensure product safety and reliability. However, we may explore options for these higher capacities in the future, using thorough testing to meet our quality standards.

Very interesting.

Optional GPU expansion card(s) augmenting the M2 Ultra’s integrated GPU is the only way I can see an Apple Silicon Mac Pro truly matching or exceeding the capabilities of the current Intel Mac Pro’s dual Radeon Pro W6900X GPU option. At this point my guess would be such an expansion card would use an Apple GPU rather than AMD, but we’ll see. 

Thus I think something like this will likely come with the new Mac Pro this year. Very cool to see that indeed Apple is working on this kind of thing. 

I enjoy reading your reviews like this one, refreshingly distinct from the Apple-commentator-echo chamber. Nice to see an evaluation of its merits for the product it's trying to be, rather than complaints that it's not a different product altogether.

I think you meant to write “That was in part because the M4 Max was already available in the MacBook Pro.” There is no Mac Pro with M4 Max of course. 

As to the rumor, offering an M3 Ultra and M4 Max at the same time seems pretty weird, and also a bit insulting to their highest end, biggest spending customers not to offer a chip with the improvements of the M4 generation. The M4 Max would be closer to the performance of an M3 Ultra than it would an M4 Ultra, I think you’d see a lot of people choosing the M4 Max as the best value option.

The only strategic reason I could imagine would be to push high-end buyers to an M4 Ultra Mac Pro, but I don’t think Apple wants to push the Mac Pro. They don’t want to be on the hook for supporting whatever people might plug into those PCIe slots. It feels more like they are stuck supporting the Mac Pro for a segment of their pro customer base that demands the PCIe slots for specialized I/O, ultra fast data storage & networking. I think Apple would be happier if everyone bought Mac Studios and the Pro tower went away.

So if this does happen, it would have to be down to some kind of manufacturing limitations. Would they also offer an M3 Max Studio along with the M3 Ultra? Call that the base model, and then offer M4 Max as an upgrade option? While not offering an upgrade option on the Ultra.

It could be something like…
$2000 M3 Max
   $3000 M4 Max upgrade option
$4000 M3 Ultra

Good news! They make some nice hardware, I hope they add software support for more products too like their webcams and game controllers.