saarek

Xed said:

saarek said:

Just in time for them to hike iCould rates in multiple countries by about a third.

Their greed knows no bounds.

So at what point should a company lose money due to inflation so that you can be happy?

thadec said:

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.