thadec

Marvin said:

The high performance computing pro market is a rounding error in the computer industry and has been for a long time.

Not even close to being true. The workstation, small server and HEDT markets are booming. There was actually a Threadripper shortage last year. Intel launched Sapphire Rapids (Xeon W-2400 and W-3400) this year to compete with Threadripper in the desktop workstation market. AMD is going to launch the Threadripper 7900X this year along with the usual Pro 7900WX in order to compete with Intel in HEDTs. I am still wondering what is keeping Nvidia from getting in on the act with a stripped down version of their Grace chips targeting this market.

Engineers, architects, researchers etc. have always needed workstations. Do you think that these entire professions stopped existing? Moved to the cloud? Or can get their work done on MacBooks now? And now they have company. Thanks to YouTube and all that, the number of people into serious video editing and computer animation has gone through the roof. Add to those the AI/ML boom the past few years and now the LLM types is going to mean still more. Yet rounding error you say. 

 Apple not being able to do the Extreme until TSMC's 2nd gen 3nm process is ready until 2024, which forced them to just stick an M2 Ultra in a cheese grater and call it a day because needing to move forward with Sonoma meant that they couldn't wait any longer, is no reason to just go and make up stuff OK?

AppleInsider said:

Apple Silicon has been great for Apple, and the Mac faithful. It's got industry-leading computing grunt to power consumption, and it does it all quietly and in a very cool package. No more lap-singeing MacBook Pros!

It's restored pricing at the low-end that hasn't been seen in a long time. It's also broken the shackles of promises Intel made for years that led to engineering choices that couldn't handle the heat as well as they should have been able to when the chips that fell short of those lofty goals were delivered.

Honestly guys this isn't true. At all. The consensus - see Tom's Hardware and Wccftech is that the M2 Ultra's Geekbench scores are essentially the same as the Intel Core i9-13900K (Geekbench 5 has the i9 slightly higher, Geekbench 6 the Ultra slightly higher). Now the Core i9 is a chip primarily for desktop gamers. A hypothetical Mac Pro refresh would have had a Xeon W9-3495X that crushes the Core i9 and should have had an AMD Threadripper 7000 that when it launches in September crushes the Xeon W9. Claiming that an Intel Core i9 system with 256 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD and an Nvidia RTX A5000 (or AMD Radeon Pro W6800X) will set you back $10,000 just isn't being honest. 
Apple Silicon is only a better value than AMD systems in particular when you don't have the added expense of a discrete GPU, like the $599 Mac Mini whose integrated GPU is better than the entry level AMD, Nvidia and Intel discrete options. Otherwise x86 systems perform better and are cheaper.

When the M3 Extreme arrives next year, maybe. But an M2 Ultra workstation with CPU performance no better than a desktop PC chip and graphics performance akin to a midlevel pro dGPU? Not a chance.

JamesCude said:

The Mac Pro becomes even more of a niche product with the Mac Studio out there. The Studio offers more than enough power for most use cases and the need for PCI cards is rarer than ever. 

Too bad- it’s awesome to have gobs of power but with the insane efficiency of Apple Silicon it’s no longer necessary. You can have your cake and eat it already.

Sorry, but this isn't even close to being true. The workstation and small server markets were already large before the boom in data science, ML and AI, and now with the LLM stuff it is going to get even bigger. Then there are the traditional use cases mentioned by @mikethemartian - physics/engineering, medical research, financial/economics modeling applications - to which we can also add CAD, architecture, animation, VFX etc. A lot of those require the most RAM and best GPUs that you can throw at them (for parallel processing, not actual graphics). In some cases integrated approach makes things worse. Discrete GPUs come with their own memory. While Apple's integrated CPU, GPU and RAM approach makes certain things faster and reduces power consumption, it creates bottlenecks when both the CPU and GPU are trying to access the same memory pool. And that is with 192 GB RAM not being nearly enough anyway. 

That being said, I have left several comments on here to this effect: a Mac Pro is whatever Apple calls a Mac Pro. The first iPhone had a 3.5" screen, 128 MB RAM, a single core RISC SOC and the original plan was no app store with an emphasis on HTML5 apps. Look at an iPhone 14 Pro Max by comparison. Also, compare the original iPod to the iPod Touch. The original Mac Mini to the M2 Pro Mac Mini. The original Apple TV to the current one. The iMac G3 to the current iMac. And so on. 

Apple can openly concede that the old Xeon W-based Mac Pro was a failure - too big, too noisy, too expensive, had crazy power/cooling requirements, was rarely updated, sold in much lower volumes than workstations from HP, Lenovo, Dell etc. - and the concept is being scrapped. And they can market the new Mac Pro as a innovative computing segment with use cases and markets that they define. 

Why do this? Because frankly ... they don't have a choice. First, Intel has made up a lot of ground in a very short time. Second, the best workstations no longer have Intel Xeon W inside anyway. They have AMD Threadripper. Would even an M3 Extreme Mac Pro outperform the AMD Threadripper 7000 that we are going to get in September? If so, it will only be due to the 7000 still being on a 5nm process. Meaning that when the 3nm Threadripper 8000 comes out in early 2025? Apple won't be able to compete with general purpose Intel and AMD workstations on CPU, GPU or RAM. So, position it as a special purpose device that is better for the things that Apple claims in the ways that Apple says that it is. 

narwhal said:

PREDICTION: MacBook Air 15, the last of the M2 Macs, will release at WWDC and will be a top-seller due to its lower price and bigger screen. The rest of the Mac lineup will wait for M3.

With a 15 inch screen no way is it going to have a lower price than either the $999 or the $1199 MBA. The only thing that could reduce the price is its using a TSMC 5 process that is now legacy, with everything else but certain x86 PC parts now at 4nm (and Apple at 3nm). 

Yeah ... this never gets old. When IDC, Canalys and Gartner report record-breaking and market leading sales, everyone loves them. When they were reporting massive sales for Apple Silicon Macs the past 2 years, as well as increasing sales of iPads, iPhones and Apple Watch no one questioned their veracity. But the first bit of bad news, the same people who had no issue with all the good news want to claim "well these guys always get it wrong and their biased towards Windows and Android anyway." Can we get some consistency please?

In any event, this tracks with what was already being reported. Apple's reported drop in PC revenue. (If sales figures were large enough to be notable, Apple would provide them.) Apple's suppliers reporting drops and lower revenue, including big ones like Samsung and TSMC. And the reports that Apple halted M2 production that a lot of people mocked are a lot more believable now. 

Right now you have a ton of evidence that Mac sales have fallen off, much - though not all - of it due to circumstances beyond Apple's control. And you have no evidence otherwise beyond fanboy conjecture based on this idea that ARM-based Macs are this massive paradigm shift in technology that is going to destroy Wintel once and for all. Sure ... except that even when Apple was reporting record sales and profits, market share never actually exceeded 11%. And claims that ARM Macs destroying Wintel followed the same claims of how the iPhone and iPad meant the inevitable end of Wintel from 10 years ago. 

But the bottom line: the pandemic and recession issues are likely temporary. Things are going to level out. But when they do, Macs are going to go back to their 5% to 8% market share as before. A lot of the market share increase the past 2 years was x86 Mac owners upgrading a few years earlier than usual to get Apple Silicon. But all that is done with now and the results are fundamentally unchanged: the vast majority of personal, professional and enterprise purchases will be Windows and the rest will be split between macOS and ChromeOS.