Apple Scales Back High-End Mac Pro Plans, Weighs Production Move To Asia (bloomberg.com) 33
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by Mark Gurman: The new high-end Mac Pro with Apple silicon is behind schedule, and you can blame changes to the company's chip and manufacturing plans. When Apple announced plans in June 2020 to transition away from Intel processors to Mac chips designed in-house, the company said the move would take about two years. Now at the tail end of 2022, it's clear that Apple has missed its self-imposed deadline for completing the shift. In addition to not offering a Mac Pro with Apple silicon, the company still only sells the high-end version of the Mac mini desktop in an Intel flavor. While Apple has said little to nothing about its future Mac desktops or the reasons behind the holdup, the company continues to actively test an all-new Mac Pro and an M2 Pro-based Mac mini to replace the remaining Intel models. Apple had aimed to introduce the new Mac Pro by now, but the high-end machine has been held up for a number of reasons, including multiple changes to its features, a significant shift in the company's plans for high-end processors and a potential relocation of its manufacturing.
When Apple first set out to build a replacement for the Intel Mac Pro, it planned a machine with a processor based on the original M1 chip. The approach called for two main configurations: one chip equal to the power of two M1 Max processors -- the highest-end MacBook Pro chip -- and another equal to four M1 Max components combined. The dual M1 Max chip ended up first launching in the Mac Studio as the M1 Ultra, and Apple decided to push back the Mac Pro to the M2 generation. The company then planned for the Mac Pro to come in two configurations: an M2 Ultra version and a double-M2 Ultra that I've dubbed the "M2 Extreme." The M2 Ultra chip is destined to have some serious specifications for professional users, including up to 24 CPU cores, 76 graphics cores and the ability to top out the machine with at least 192 gigabytes of memory. An M2 Extreme chip would have doubled that to 48 CPU cores and 152 graphics cores. But here's the bad news: The company has likely scrapped that higher-end configuration, which may disappoint Apple's most demanding users -- the photographers, editors and programmers who prize that kind of computing power.
The company made the decision because of both the complexity and cost of producing a processor that is essentially four M2 Max chips fused together. It also will help Apple and partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. save chip-production resources for higher-volume machines. Moreover, there are concerns about how much consumers are willing to spend. Using the highest-end M1 Ultra chip pushes the Mac Studio up to $5,000 -- only $1,000 less than the current Mac Pro. That's $3,000 more than the M1 Max Mac Studio. Based on Apple's current pricing structure, an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000 -- without any other upgrades -- making it an extraordinarily niche product that likely isn't worth the development costs, engineering resources and production bandwidth it would require. Instead, the Mac Pro is expected to rely on a new-generation M2 Ultra chip (rather than the M1 Ultra) and will retain one of its hallmark features: easy expandability for additional memory, storage and other components. Gurman says the Mac Mini update "will come in regular M2 and M2 Pro variations, while new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros are arriving early next year with M2 Pro and M2 Max options." A high-end iMac Pro with Apple silicon is also in the works, "but that machine has suffered internal delays for similar reasons as the Mac Pro," he notes.
In addition, Gurman says Apple is "working on multiple new external monitors [...], including an update to the Pro Display XDR that was launching alongside the Intel Mac Pro in 2019." The new monitors will also include Apple silicon.
When Apple first set out to build a replacement for the Intel Mac Pro, it planned a machine with a processor based on the original M1 chip. The approach called for two main configurations: one chip equal to the power of two M1 Max processors -- the highest-end MacBook Pro chip -- and another equal to four M1 Max components combined. The dual M1 Max chip ended up first launching in the Mac Studio as the M1 Ultra, and Apple decided to push back the Mac Pro to the M2 generation. The company then planned for the Mac Pro to come in two configurations: an M2 Ultra version and a double-M2 Ultra that I've dubbed the "M2 Extreme." The M2 Ultra chip is destined to have some serious specifications for professional users, including up to 24 CPU cores, 76 graphics cores and the ability to top out the machine with at least 192 gigabytes of memory. An M2 Extreme chip would have doubled that to 48 CPU cores and 152 graphics cores. But here's the bad news: The company has likely scrapped that higher-end configuration, which may disappoint Apple's most demanding users -- the photographers, editors and programmers who prize that kind of computing power.
The company made the decision because of both the complexity and cost of producing a processor that is essentially four M2 Max chips fused together. It also will help Apple and partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. save chip-production resources for higher-volume machines. Moreover, there are concerns about how much consumers are willing to spend. Using the highest-end M1 Ultra chip pushes the Mac Studio up to $5,000 -- only $1,000 less than the current Mac Pro. That's $3,000 more than the M1 Max Mac Studio. Based on Apple's current pricing structure, an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000 -- without any other upgrades -- making it an extraordinarily niche product that likely isn't worth the development costs, engineering resources and production bandwidth it would require. Instead, the Mac Pro is expected to rely on a new-generation M2 Ultra chip (rather than the M1 Ultra) and will retain one of its hallmark features: easy expandability for additional memory, storage and other components. Gurman says the Mac Mini update "will come in regular M2 and M2 Pro variations, while new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros are arriving early next year with M2 Pro and M2 Max options." A high-end iMac Pro with Apple silicon is also in the works, "but that machine has suffered internal delays for similar reasons as the Mac Pro," he notes.
In addition, Gurman says Apple is "working on multiple new external monitors [...], including an update to the Pro Display XDR that was launching alongside the Intel Mac Pro in 2019." The new monitors will also include Apple silicon.
Please excuse me while I gripe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple Scales Back High-End Mac Pro Plans, Weighs Production Move To Asia
Moving production to Asia, huh? Well, that really narrows it down. Are we talking China? India? Oh, maybe Russia? Perhaps Mongolia. Maybe it's one of those Philippine islands....can't ever quite tell whether they're "Asia" or not...oh, wait, Uzbekistan, it's Uzbekistan, right?
It's only when you read deep into the article that we get this nugget...
The move to Asia, though, will come with a significant twist. Instead of being built in China like most iPhone models and other products, the new high-end Mac is expected to be produced in Vietnam.
Hey Bloomberg press, is it really too hard to have your headline read, "Apple Scales Back High-End Mac Pro Plans, Weighs Production Move To Vietnam"? Please do the world a favor next time and don't use the world's biggest continent to describe a specific location on the planet, alright? Thanks.
I'll get off my soap box now.
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That's not the issue. The issue is that Slashdot editors only seem to copy headlines verbatim when they are shit headlines. If instead they are good headlines they look for other ways to fuck them up.
Re: Please excuse me while I gripe... (Score:1)
Perhaps, but I wouldn't rule out Romulan involvement.
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Hey Bloomberg press, is it really too hard to have your headline read
How about you read the actual story rather than just the headline. Everyone on this site screams about misinformation and then none of them see the irony in this kind of argument. Read the story and comment. Or don't read it and shut up. But I'm not behind this notion that people should be encouraged to summarized something that is nuanced into twenty words or less. That's how misinformation starts. If you're going to get on a soap box about the story being too long, that's just encouraging more of th
The new Mac Pro is already a failure. (Score:1, Interesting)
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I suspect if you look at their profits, much of that doesn't come from the "pro market." Not surprising that it's a secondary concern to keeping their consumer products competitive.
hollywood likes to have apple stuff in movies and (Score:1)
hollywood likes to have apple stuff in movies and high end workstations some times are apple and yes they will pay 10K+ for one.
Re:hollywood likes to have apple stuff in movies a (Score:4, Informative)
And your point would be? Because "occasionally used as a movie prop" doesn't seem like a sustainable market for an Apple product.
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movie prop + used to make the movies as well.
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I doubt that the big studios are doing that anymore. Most of them outsource their render farms to AWS, where they can process them on a bunch of spot instances to get that work done faster and cheaper.
Re: hollywood likes to have apple stuff in movies (Score:2)
Thank you for clarifying. Nevertheless it would be funny if they had models developed primarily for product placement.
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I'd argue that their consumer products are extremely competitive. Profits aside, Apple earns a lot of cachet from their computer division. They are around the 3rd to 5th largest in PC sales, depending on the year. They make the objectively best laptops on the market, and the iMac is the best line of uni-body computers on the market. Vertical integration is part of their branding, so keeping their consumer products up to date is important. Thus, they keep updating their laptop lineup on an annual basis.
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Apple was killing it up until they released the trashcan Macs. They could have just released a new cheese-grater Mac Pro tower every year throughout the 2010's with minimal design changes and the pros would have been happy and well served. But since the 2012 trashcans, Apple has been paying just lip service, and it's sad how brainwashed that community is that they keep lapping up the BS Apple feeds them.
Agreed that those machines were an awful design.
Now 10 years later, pricing on the new Mac Pro tower is a joke.
Only because they haven't updated them in three years. They were pretty impressive on day one, right up until the ARM transition put a stop to any refreshes. The result is that it ended up being just as much of a dead end as the trash can; only the reason for the lack of refreshes is different.
The current Macbook Pros are a shadow of what they used to be because they lack discrete graphics.
I would argue that the lack of NVIDIA discrete graphics makes them a shadow of what they used to be. Nobody doing any sort of rendering or video compression wants AMD
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Apple was killing it up until they released the trashcan Macs. They could have just released a new cheese-grater Mac Pro tower every year throughout the 2010's with minimal design changes and the pros would have been happy and well served. But since the 2012 trashcans, Apple has been paying just lip service, and it's sad how brainwashed that community is that they keep lapping up the BS Apple feeds them.
Agreed that those machines were an awful design.
Now 10 years later, pricing on the new Mac Pro tower is a joke.
Only because they haven't updated them in three years. They were pretty impressive on day one, right up until the ARM transition put a stop to any refreshes. The result is that it ended up being just as much of a dead end as the trash can; only the reason for the lack of refreshes is different.
It was joke from the start. Entry level for a Mac Pro tower was 5 or 6 grand for an 8 core CPU with anemic ram and hard drive space. I priced them out for my video production guys at the time. I could have gotten them an equivalent PC workstation for half the price, or 3X the horsepower for the same price. I will admit, they were very impressive if you had deep pockets.
The current Macbook Pros are a shadow of what they used to be because they lack discrete graphics.
I would argue that the lack of NVIDIA discrete graphics makes them a shadow of what they used to be. Nobody doing any sort of rendering or video compression wants AMD graphics; they want to run Iray, which at last check was NVIDIA-only. The last time Apple put an NVIDIA GPU in a Mac was 2015. So the discrete GPUs in Pro Macs haven't really been useful for actual pro use for a long time. Why waste power on a discrete GPU that's really only going to get used for gaming, when any pro rendering is going to use CPU fallback anyway?
I don't understand Apple's hate for NVIDIA. I get that they don't like discrete graphics in laptops with the heat and space constraints
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I wish apple would just bow out of the pro workstation market. But again, it's part of their branding. They are supposed to be the "creative" platform, so they release just enough new products to keep up interest while they gaslight creative professionals.
And cede it to what? Windows is a terrible OS architecturally, and causes too many headaches to be worth dealing with. Linux lacks the pro software base to be viable.
What I'd like Apple to do would be to announce that they're going to keep Intel support around indefinitely, and license macOS to third parties, but only on Intel (not ARM). That would mean that third parties will never reach parity in terms of performance vs. battery life, so they wouldn't be able to really compete with Apple's laptop hardware, but would still be able to fill in niches that Apple doesn't fill competently, like pro workstations. But I'm not holding my breath.
Alternatively, Apple could pay NVIDIA to port Iray to Metal so that it can run on Apple's GPUs, or Apple could pay NVIDIA to make drivers available for macOS so that their GPUs can be used externally or in workstation-class Macs, or....
It would be nice if Apple would license their OS. I'd love to run it in a VM. Apple will never again license their OS. They don't want to compete in that market. They don't want to be a software vendor. They don't want to give up any control. The last time they tried it with MacOS they had expected their licensees to make high-end workstations. They instead made cheaper consumer products and undercut Apple's pricing.
I was under the impression that Apple actually wanted the third-party licensees to build low-end hardware, because Apple didn't really have any cheap products at the time. Instead, the clone makers found ways to use a lot more commodity parts (power supplies, cases, etc.), allowing them to build high-end products that cost less than Apple's products.
Either way, that's why I suggested licensing it only on Intel. Intel is never going to approach the performance per watt of a RISC architecture, assuming all
mobile chips don't scale to pro / have low IO for (Score:3)
mobile chips don't scale to pro / have low IO for workstations.
They really more storage then just 1 disk even more so at apple high markup on it's ssd's
Also the pro workstation really need more choice then just raid 0 that needs an 2th system to reload / restore the basic os and boot loader after and storage change.
TB only exp is not good for an pro workstation and even with TB should have 4-6 buses + video out on it's own BUS. OR have data only TB ports.
pro workstations also may need an lot of ram in slots
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They really more storage then just 1 disk even more so at apple high markup on it's ssd's
I think it is safe to say that the pro desktop will have PCIe slots, which will support arbitrary amounts of NVME storage.
Also the pro workstation really need more choice then just raid 0 that needs an 2th system to reload / restore the basic os and boot loader after and storage change.
What hardware are you talking about here? Mac Studio? The current Mac Pro can boot from external storage just fine. I do it all the time.
pro workstations also may need an lot of ram in slots.
At that point, with the way the new Mac Pro is expected to be designed, it would likely be a NUMA architecture. So even though I agree that RAM must be expandable in any real Pro desktop, I'm quite cynical about the odds that Apple will make that po
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Apple Silicon doesn't scale to desktop, let alone workstation use.
ARM needs a lot of memory bandwidth because ARM code is not very dense. To get the performance they are seeing, well below x86 CPUs, they need to tightly couple high speed RAM and massive caches.
Moving the RAM off the CPU substrate will slow it down.
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Apple speculation profiteering (Score:3)
Just the usual profiteering off of Apple speculation. Doesn't have to make sense.
"...and will retain one of its hallmark features: easy expandability for additional memory, storage and other components..."
Because Apple silicon is famous for its memory and storage expandability. Perhaps the "other components" refers to external GPU? Multifunction cards? Serial, parallel, RTC and 384K memory? Dual floppies?
"Using the highest-end M1 Ultra chip pushes the Mac Studio up to $5,000 -- only $1,000 less than the current Mac Pro. That's $3,000 more than the M1 Max Mac Studio. Based on Apple's current pricing structure, an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000"
These are Apple retail pricing examples, dishonest ones considering the unlike memory and flash configurations, so they aren't based on underlying costs. Essentially, what the article is claiming is that Apple makes technical development decisions based purely on their ability to charge absurd markups for memory and flash; the unjustified pricing structure doesn't leave enough room. Far more likely that such a product would not make technical sense for other reasons. And why shouldn't a Studio be priced like a Pro?
Apple wouldn't have any problem charging 10K base for a computer even if they could charge a lot less. It is, in fact, the business they are in and the claim here says more about the craven nature of the fanboyism that generates this speculation than it does about Apple itself. Perhaps what we are seeing is that the Apple approach to non-modular, non-expandable custom chip integration means not being able to effectively produce higher end designs because the volume cannot justify it. Hmmm, it's almost if there is a reason other companies package processor, memory and storage separately.
storage is not on die but on apple own cards (Score:2)
storage is not on die but on apple own cards with high markup.
apple can do pci-e m.2 slots and be done with it.
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The storage controller is on die. The "SSD" in a M1/M2 is little more than a circuit board with raw flash chips, which is why you can't easily upgrade storage in a M1/M2. The storage controller won't recognize new memory volume. Apple could (and should, in my opinion) use m.2 storage but the pci-e interface would reduce bandwidth and add lag.
If apple was planning there own servers then maybe (Score:2)
If apple was planning there own servers then maybe it will be easier to have an pro workstation chip.
But server hardware is not apples thing / apple is not even setup for hot swap storage.
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Sure if you define "almost no" as meaning "most".
Depending on the country Macbooks range anywherebetween the most popular to fifth most popular (Seems to be keyed to how wealthy folks are, apples aint cheap). And this is definately true in businesses too, especially amongst management and the C suite. Them rich dudes love their apples.
The problem is, its an absolute pain
First work with TSMC to build non-Taiwan fabs... (Score:3)
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I think Taiwan has no intention of letting the top process fabs get off the island. Let's face it, if they did the West would most likely turn a blind eye and refuse to engage in order to protect their investments and market access in China instead. The US will offer relocations for fab equipment and the all-important personnel in case of invasion, if TSMC takes it the island is gone.
Taiwan needs to be essential in order to be helped, the numbers do not make sense otherwise.
weird time for cpus (Score:2)
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Chip design team burnout or missing skills? (Score:2)
To my mind Apple either counted on a chip design team that