Rogue01

techconc said:

No matter how you spin it, the M2 Mac Pro is a real disappointment.  Full stop. 

The only excuse I’d give Apple for this disappointment is if they felt it were more important to formally complete the Apple Silicon transition than it was to provide a proper pro machine.  So, if this is a stop gap measure to hold us until this time next year, then fine.

The Mac Pro is meant to be the flagship device… the pinnacle of Mac performance.  Instead, it’s a Mac Studio with PCI slots.  At the very least, an M2 Extreme (2 M2 Ultra chips) is what users are expecting.  Apple seems content on comparing to a 4 year old Intel Mac Pro while ignoring the current Intel / nVidia 4090 based solutions.   That would address the CPU / GPU scalability concerns or at least help mute them.
The other concern is memory.  192 GB is fine for most solutions, but there are very high end needs which go well beyond that.

You nailed it right there.  Three years later and Apple could not finish their Apple Silicon transition, and it has become an embarrassment.  Apple completed the Intel transition of ALL Macs in 270 days.  They didn't know what to do with the Mac Pro because they knew the Intel/nVidia 4090 combination smoked the M1 Ultra in GPU performance.  So they threw in the towel and said F'it.  Just release a half-a$$ Mac Pro with a Mac Studio inside and limited card support, and no GPU card support.  Why not, let's make it $1,000 more than the model it is replacing.  Watch the keynote of the Blue and White G3. Steve Jobs said it best...our Pro customers want expandability and they want easy access inside to all the parts.  Those days are long gone.  Now we have new Macs with one year old CPUs (M2 released June 2022), and an iMac with an almost 3 year old CPU.  Yeah, that's progress and better than Intel's roadmap that saw year after year of upgraded and faster Macs with new CPUs.  So the new Mac Pro - $1,000 price hike, and $3,000 more for slots with limited support.  Even a Pro would not buy this.

charlesn said:

We know that memory is handled differently on Apple Silicon vs Intel, so why is it assumed that the 192GB max is “a problem?” I’d like to see the test where this problem is actually shown. Also:  on what video tasks is Apple’s on-board video proving to be an issue vs a separate video card?

It has been well documented by plenty of reviewers that the insufficient memory expansion is a problem.  192GB v 1.5TB?  Huge difference and apps that are memory hungry will choke with 192GB.  Memory may be faster on chip, but it still has a limited cap and apps that want more memory cannot do it with 16, 24, 32, 64, 96 or now 192GB.  Please explain how you think memory is handled different with Apple Silicon where less memory is preferred?  The iMac went from supporting 128GB of RAM to 16GB of RAM.  I used an M1 iMac and iMovie bounced in the dock 10 times before it actually opened.  How is the limited RAM an improvement?  People doing heavy video editing on a 32GB Mac Studio say their Pro apps choke because of the limited memory.  The apps want more, but none is available.

Did you miss the article last year when Apple got busted for intentionally cropping the GPU graph of the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra?  Apple tried to claim the GPU in the M1 Ultra was faster than the fastest dedicated GPU card at the time; however, Apple's graph was intentionally cut off at 200w of power consumption for the GPU.  It did not take long for others to post the real GPU results of the dedicated card operating at its full power potential over 300w, and smoking the M1 Ultra GPU, limited to 200w.  In a desktop Mac, power efficiency is not an issue.  That's why Apple took so long to do an Apple Silicon Mac Pro.  The Intel Mac Pro with the high performance GPU cards outperform the fastest on-chip GPU in Apple Silicon.  Now that it is 3 years later, Apple figured they had to do something, so they stuck a Mac Studio inside the Mac Pro case, and restricted the PCI-E card expansion to exclude GPU cards.  They know a dedicated GPU card will outperform the onboard GPU of the M2 Ultra.

"This is all a shame if you love games and have an Intel Mac, but it's inevitable — and a reason why Apple made the switch to Apple silicon. The Mac is now capable of much more than it was with Intel processors, and Apple is rightly making the most of it."

The most misguided comment ever.  If you love games and have an Intel Mac, you can use Boot Camp and boot Windows 10 and run far more games than ever offered on the Mac.  Far better than Apple Silicon would offer when it comes to games on the Mac.  Then switch back to the Mac when done playing games.  

Apple's road map with Apple Silicon is a mess.  With Intel, Apple updated all the Macs across the line.  With Apple Silicon, you now have Macs using outdated chips and new Macs using one year old chips.  Apple has the M2 and M2 Pro and M2 Max, but they offer the iMac with the M1, and still charge the same price from two years ago.  There is no reason why the iMac should not offer the M2, M2 Pro, and M2 Max, and return to the 27" display offering.

As far as macOS Sonoma, the few features only offered to Apple Silicon are features that most people would never use anyway.  I remember widgets when they were offered in Mac OS X Tiger, with Dashboard.  No one used them and they were deprecated.  I would imagine the same will be true with widgets again.  I never use widgets on my iPad, so I certainly don't want them on my Mac.  And that Lock Screen?  Get the user accounts back in the center of the display.  In a corporate environment, you have Macs with multiple user accounts, like the admin, so bring them all back to the center of the screen.

When you upgrade the memory and storage in the 15" MacBook Air, you are only a few hundred dollars away from the 14" MacBook Pro with more memory and the same storage configuration.  The 14" MacBook Pro is a faster Mac, with more features, and offers a much better cooling system than the MacBook Air.  The article mentioned the benefits, but forgot to mention that the 14" has a better cooling system, which is important because the Air will throttle sooner and more often than the 14" model.  I think most would prefer the 14" model for a few hundred dollars more.

Ive is "trying to make our lives just a little bit better," 

Unfortunately, the round hockey puck mouse and butterfly keyboard made our lives just a little bit more frustrating.  Not everything he designed was a winner.  Now that he is gone, Apple can make MacBooks that have reliable keyboards that work.