samuraiartguy

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samuraiartguy
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  • Mac Pro in danger after fumbled Apple Silicon launch

    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. 
    williamlondonavon b7watto_cobra
  • A new Mac Pro is coming, confirms Apple exec

    I have my doubts, when an Apple Executive has clearly taken some pains to explicitly not mention the Mac Pro – I am inclined to take him at his word. Same with the wild-eyed projections about “ComputeModule.” There is dead zero evidence other than tech writers breathless wish fulfillment that this undefined technology has anything to do with a new Mac Pro - fer blip’s sake, they run iOS, not Mac OS. 

    Don’t mind me, I’m not a tech pundit, just a workin’ class Creative Pro here… 
    aderutterwilliamlondonentropysStrangeDayswatto_cobraAlex1N
  • New Mac Pro may not support PCI-E GPUs

    I have been saying that the AS Mac Pros, based on Apple inclinations and behaviors were not likely to support third party GPUs, and other than speculation, there is no indication of AS even having PCIe support. If it does, it will only be for specialty PCIe cards. The whole point of Apple Silicon, and taking everything in house as much as inhumanly possible was to reduce any and all external dependencies, and have complete control over their entire process,… and margins. Apple could work and play with others, but they’d rather not. Do not expect upgradable RAM, GPUs, or possibly not even Storage except via Thunderbolt. I suspect the reason we’re still seeing the existing case design, is Apple may have a lot of them laying about unsold, and they are just swapping in AS motherboards and processors - but these will apparently be very different machines. 

    Since my needs are not that rarefied - and my budget certainly isn’t - when my two Mac Pro cheesegraters 2010 & 2012 respectively give up the ghost, or get doorstopped by some critical software or systems update, I’ll likely buy a Mac Studio or the (expected but not even remotely confirmed) 27” iMac/iMac Pro. 

    Cue the howling from the Creative and high end user communities. But Apple doesn’t hear us. Remember that the overwhelming majority of their audience and profit are iPhones. Computings is a secondary priority, with the Mac Pro, their smallest market segment, dead last, with an uncertain future. 

    This could create a branching, once again for the platform, where Apple is depreciated by software developers and applications dependent on, or optimized for the APIs, drivers, and capabilities of NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, and further accelerate the exodus of alienated professional users to the Windows side with all it’s issues. Unless there is a compelling performance advantage case for the Mac Pro, without its primary attractions, modularity, user expandability and use-case specific customization - there is little for the majority of MP users to stick with the machine. 

    But hey, what do I know? I only work for a living…. 
    ravnorodomcanukstormentropyswatto_cobraiHy