AniMill

The Mac Pro is a kludge. I’m betting they tried to punch a hole in the sky, but the sky punched back: no 3rd party video card support, and no extended RAM to 1.5TB (for serious math/design labs). An M3 Extreme isn’t likely because the niche audience will use PC’s with multiple AMD/nvidia cards or simply off-load to cloud render farms. The days of the Mac Pro are waning - very sad. But the rise of the Mac Studio is a happy compromise. And I agree - stacks of M2 Pro Mac Minis are a serious consideration for homegrown render farms.

The death of the Mac Pro has started. The Mac Studio was always meant to become the content creators’ workhorse. Shame. How cool would a render beast be with multiple video cards. But really, who needs so much local render power any longer - web render farms have become so cheap that keeping up your own farm simply isn’t worth it.

Either the Mac Pro is dead, or so delayed that it’s become superfluous in their product lineup. Perhaps it’s become such a niche that any further investment simply is not a viability for Apple anymore. Either way, if Apple does not at least preview a Mac Pro option at WWDC, I think it’s dead Jim. Though $3000 ski goggles are considered the “next” thing - but I believe AR/VR is already past the public interest inflection point. WWDC is going to be a very interesting show.

EVERY tech company has some sort of tie in to China’s infrastructure and consequently their military. I buy Apple even though they are built in factories that pay their workers pathetic wages by our standards, but Apple’s investment has brought up the living standards there too. As for DJI, they are one of the reasons Ukraine is beating the Russians. The affordability and performance of their drones makes them a unique weapon that’s changed war tactics. I support and buy DJI.

I think Apple is over-thinking the Mac Pro. The niche user-group (not small, just specialized) doesn’t need the fastest data lane interconnects, they want lots of them allowing for PCIE technology to be added to their beasts. Yes they want fast machines, killer fast, but real modularity is king. Don’t try to maximize the Mx to permit crazy fast interconnections at the loss of lanes, open it up to lots of lanes.

The Mac Studio is the perfect DCC machine, so don’t mess with it (except add some pizzaz please). Let the king of Macs have the modifiable tower, with ooodles of expansion and RAM slots even if it costs a few TB/s in interconnect bandwidth.

Just ship the damned thing!