anonconformist

The old (current) MacPro has expansion capability far exceeding what every other Apple system has, including RAM up to 1.5 TB.

Unless they cede the MacPro market that defines, it makes no sense to make the Mac Studio a one-and-done, because it isn’t remotely that expandable and can’t be made to be without making the squarish peg in the round hole mistake they made with the trashcan MacPro and stupidly over-constraining their most powerful system sold.

How big is the market for something more powerful than what is reasonably seen with the M2 Ultra for RAM? I submit Apple knows more of that than everyone else. Either they have run into problems trying to make a new Apple Silicon MacPro, or they’ve determined the market size for the MacPro isn’t large enough to justify the overhead, are both more reasonable expectations than Apple making the loved (my assessment, what are the numbers? Again, Apple knows) Mac Studio a one-and-done design, as it addresses a clear market point for price and functionality that wasn’t ever really served well by the MacPro.

Watched the Netflix short series on this on Saturday. I would have thought if they couldn’t make the financials work via leveraging peer-to-peer redundancy and providing for others, it makes even less financial sense to move to using all their own servers. I found it interesting that it involved a little “what if?” Into 2025 where they’re looking to get another billion in funding.

if they nave 400 million users now (especially monthly) a billion $ doesn’t go far, that’s $2.50/user should that projection remain the same borrowing with the current number of users.

They’ve now got what seems like sufficient scale that there are a couple things going:

1. they should have economies of scale with so many users, even with servers around the world, if they do it right. Of course, a big emphasis in that series was on latency, so perhaps demanding too low of a latency ruins that
2. They’re already in the realm of the lass of big numbers that also means in practice, since they’ve been around long enough and enough people know of it, if they were going to get more people as customers, they most probably would already have them: there’s a much harder fight to get more paying customers beyond a certain point, and there’s Pareto’s Law which says 20% of your effort gets 80% of the benefits and the other 20% (if you go for it) will take 80% of the effort. They’ve likely already dug into that attempt at the unprofitable 80% of the potential market.

DAalseth said:

longfang said:

DAalseth said:

I have a feeling that Apple will introduce an M-Series Mac Pro, but keep the Intel version around.

Apple historically doesn’t really do the hang on to the past thing. 

Also consider that getting rid of Intel would vastly simplify software development efforts. 

True, but there’s Mac Pro users that need massive amounts of RAM. Amounts that Apple Silicon just doesn’t support.

That said, I’m not a computer engineer so it may be a crazy idea;
Would it be feasible to use two tiers of RAM? The high speed RAM built into the chip, and then a TB or more of comparatively slow conventional RAM in sticks on the MB like it has now? It would have to keep track of what needed to be kept in the extra high speed on chip space, and what could be parked on the sticks. It would be like virtual RAM does now but not to the SSD.
Not sure how feasible this is but it was a crazy idea that just crossed my mind. 

Technically having the on-package RAM and the regular external RAM is fully feasible from the hardware POV, with all the engineering and power costs associated with it.

To make proper usage of top speed memory would ideally involve providing special APIs to enable the applications providing hints to the OS as to what’s most important to be fast, something that’s not unheard of in operating systems, No OS will know how to optimize everything as-is, and a decent OS enables developers and users to set parameters as to what and how to optimize for their needs.

JP234 said:

Sure, 8TB is impressive. But do you know anyone who would commit 8TB of important data on a single drive? At this capacity, the only logical choice is a 5 bay, level 5 RAID with 2TB drives with hot swap redundant capability if one fails. Sure, it's going to cost 2-3 times as much, but what's 8 TB of your data worth, anyway?

If your data is truly vitally important, consider also the need to have a geographically-diverse backup as well.  Unfortunately, for many, backing up online takes a significant amount of time due to asymmetric download/upload speeds with their internet connections, and limited monthly transfer quotas.

But if you don’t add too much new data too fast, that’s sufficiently workable without shipping hard drives or media around.

There are two main types of drive owners: those that have lost data due to some sort of failure, and those that will lose data, given long enough usage.  As I’ve not gotten into storing videos or creating them as a regular thing, I’ve not bothered getting a hard drive or SSD more than 1 TB in size since 2010 because I’ve not found a need for that much on a device.  Storage capacity has gone up faster than the combination of how much space most people will use before a drive tends to fail from age and use, so it’s a curious balance to be struck.