atonaldenim

great to see that Apple is putting some resources into promoting gaming on their platforms.

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. 

CluntBaby92 said:

B&H shows this hooked up to binder camera equipment, which is very enticing to me being a videographer. Really wondering/hoping this gets supported by Blackmagic and their Pocket Cinema Cameras because this seems like a really good workflow idea. Pricing isn’t bad either for what you’re getting.

Mike Wuerthele said:

we'd stick with native Thunderbolt or USB4 at least for a few years until USB-C shakes out a little more. Acasis has a really nice USB4 NVMe enclosure that I'm personally using, which would deliver full speeds on the drives that are being used in this system. Sabrent has a nice Thunderbolt one for about $100. 

Good point Mike about 40Gbps USB4 offering an even better speed improvement than 20Gbps Gen 2x2, on most/all? Apple Silicon Macs, and also for less-than-Thunderbolt prices. Looks like right now a USB4 enclosure like Acasis plus a fast PCIe 4.0 SSD would cost about $400-500 altogether, not bad at all really.

For some reason I have a little superstition about putting a desktop SSD inside a portable enclosure, I have heard that portable drives can get different firmware to draw less power or otherwise operate well in a mobile context. But I have no evidence for this, and I know plenty of people do it, so I should probably just get over it!

Blokkhead said:

Curious pricing, given that stand-alone SanDisk 4TB Extreme PRO Portable SSD - Up to 2000MB/s - USB-C, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (same speeds) is $379 amazon delivered.

Based on this news, I just ordered an open box 4TB Sandisk Extreme Pro from Amazon Warehouse for $277. A 4TB SSD with a Thunderbolt port costs well over twice that much, so this will hopefully be a good deal for now and faster in the future on a new Mac.

We'll probably also be seeing some fast USB4 SSD options hitting the market soon this year too with hopefully sub-Thunderbolt pricing.

JP234 said:

Iomega made the Zip and Jaz drives. I got a promo Zip to evaluate. I refused to give it back, and so did every other reviewer. I looked up Iomega stock, and it was $3.52/share. I bought a thousand shares (my wife wouldn't let me buy more). The next year, they split 2:1 six times, and I wound up with 12,000 shares, which got up to about $50/share. We sold 6,000 shares and paid off the mortgages on both my house and my print shop building, and bought a new BMW 325is. That was the day Iomega peaked, and we sold off the remaining 6,000 later in the year for about $25/share. The best investment we've ever made.

This is one of the best tech stock pick stories I've ever heard. Bravo!