Apple Discontinues Mac Pro (9to5mac.com) 91
Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro and says it has no plans for future models. "The 'buy' page on Apple's website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac's homepage, where all references have been removed," reports 9to5Mac. From the report: The Mac Pro has lived many lives over the years. Apple released the current Mac Pro industrial design in 2019 alongside the Pro Display XDR (which was also discontinued earlier this month). That version of the Mac Pro was powered by Intel, and Apple refreshed it with the M2 Ultra chip in June 2023. It has gone without an update since then, languishing at its $6,999 price point even as Apple debuted the M3 Ultra chip in the Mac Studio last year.
All this parmigiano reggiano (Score:5, Funny)
What am I supposed to use to grate cheese to put on my first posts in the future?
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What am I supposed to use to grate cheese to put on my first posts in the future?
Well, I've got good news and bad news:
The good news is that it's only a buck twenty-five. [dollartree.com]
The bad news is that, unfortunately, it does not include an Apple sticker to place on the back of your car.
the last mac pro had an big upchange for very litt (Score:3)
the last mac pro had an big up-change for very little over the studio.
While not the best studio + TB pci-e boxes costs way less. The pro had X16 slots but the cpu really did not have pci-e lanes to fully feed them.
The m5 studio needs some kind of of EXT pci-e port (more then just TB)
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You're probably not going to get any external PCIe port other than thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is fast enough for most Mac use cases anyway. TB5 gets you 80 Gbps bidirectional, or 120/40 Gbps asymmetrical, and there aren't a lot of things in a desktop environment that would really benefit from more than 120 Gbps.
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Is there even the software support for LLMs on macOS?
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People tend to not like having multiple computers with multiple OSes in their workflow. So people, workgroups, companies, labs, whatever, who are using MacOS will generally want to do their AI work in it too. And over the years, I've known a lot of data scientists and systems engineers who primarily use MacOS for their work, which includes training models from scratch.
Re:the last mac pro had an big upchange for very l (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually yes there is...
I'm still learning about this myself, but, from what I understand the M series of chips that Apple has come out with, with it having a CPU, GPU, and shared unified memory....it makes them uniquely capable of running local models on them...decently large models depending on how much you fork over for RAM. These M chips also have a special end unit for "intelligence processing" I think they call it.
The M5 chips just coming out look to be very good at this and it is speculated the M5 Ultra will be a high performance work horse.
Apple may have missed the mark for running AI, but the appear to have hit a home run on the hardware aspect of it.
I've seen demos on YouTube of someone hooking up like 4-5 Mac Studios that were maxed out M3 ultras I think and they were running extremely LARGE LLMs locally and getting cloud level numbers on them.
Of course these were like $10K each boxes.....but the level of model they were running would have cost my MANY more times trying to match them with NVIDIA GPU cards.....
i believe there are OSX friendly tools like ollama that make downloading, and running LLMs quite easy....and of course there's the latest sensation...OpenClaw, that folks are buying up Mac Minis for....to have multiple agents running using models of your. Choice (commercial clound or local) of models and giving them persistent memory, and ability to do a lot of things for you...depending on how comfortable you are with giving said agents long leashes and capabilities....
Do look a bit on YouTube on these topics....it's actually quite interesting.
These M chips are already giving the home user the capability to use models almost as large and on the cutting edge as the big companies.....more than enough for most users.
Right now, there's nothing x86 that can really match them...at least not for the money.
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I've seen demos on YouTube of someone hooking up like 4-5 Mac Studios that were maxed out M3 ultras I think and they were running extremely LARGE LLMs locally and getting cloud level numbers on them.
Of course these were like $10K each boxes.....but the level of model they were running would have cost my MANY more times trying to match them with NVIDIA GPU cards.....
So, 4-5 Mac Studios at about $10K/each.
You can get an NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 with 96gb ram for about $9K.
It's hard to directly compare those two, but it doesn't seem like it'd, "cost MANY more times trying to match them with NVIDIA GPU cards."
Mac Studio has a leg up in that it's a whole computer, and it can be configured with $256gb ram (for an extra $2K).
NVIDIA *probably* has a big leg up on GPU performance.
IMHO, at the scale of building out a cluster of 10+ of these, I'd lean towards the NVIDIA GPU based sol
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Alex Ziskind has all of the equipment variations, and he benchmarks them all. A single RTX Pro 6000 doesn't even come close to comparing to a cluster of M3 Ultras.
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A single RTX Pro 6000 doesn't even come close to comparing to a cluster of M3 Ultras.
That's not what I'm comparing. Based on GP, the price comparison is closer to a single RTX Pro 6000 vs a single Mac Studio. Alternatively, a cluster of 4-5 Mac Studios vs 4-5 RTX Pro 6000's. Can you point to some numbers on those? The Mac has the edge on memory, but I'm quite confident the RTX has a huge lead on GPU performance (and the memory is no slouch - just less of it per dollar).
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Arm overwhelmingly seems to be the platform of choice when it comes to running AI models. x86 is only kept alive by the need to run legacy Wintel apps: even Linux and BSD could do w/ the Arm migrations
Since FreeBSD/XNU is underlying the macOS, that part could well be useful for running AI models, and that too from easy to use dashboards
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In what way? Once the model is loaded into VRAM, very little data has to travel over the bus. You're going to be limited by storage speeds loading the model anyway.
Re: the last mac pro had an big upchange for very (Score:2)
You mean running them on an external GPU? That doesn't take much bandwidth unless you're constantly loading new models.
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the last mac pro had an big up-change for very little over the studio.
While not the best studio + TB pci-e boxes costs way less. The pro had X16 slots but the cpu really did not have pci-e lanes to fully feed them.
The m5 studio needs some kind of of EXT pci-e port (more then just TB)
Even more than the PCI-lanes, there wasn't hardware to justify it. With Apple Silicon, the GPU is built in and you can't fill the case with cards from NVidia to make it a CUDA-monster or handle graphics beyond the (impressive) abilities of the combined CPU/GPU.
If adding 3rd party GPUs was possible, the use case for actually buying a tower might have led to a huge increase in sales - relative to its existing sales level, of course.
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Even more than the PCI-lanes, there wasn't hardware to justify it. With Apple Silicon, the GPU is built in and you can't fill the case with cards from NVidia to make it a CUDA-monster or handle graphics beyond the (impressive) abilities of the combined CPU/GPU.
Exactly this. Apple neutered the Mac Pro by making all of its additional functionality useless.
Years ago, they announced that they were killing support for kernel-space drivers. Then they announced a user-space replacement, DriverKit, that is basically half-assed when it comes to PCI, providing no support for any of the sorts of PCIe drivers that anyone would actually want to write. The operating system already comes with built-in support for USB xHCI silicon and most major networking chipsets, nobody bu
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Even more than the PCI-lanes, there wasn't hardware to justify it. With Apple Silicon, the GPU is built in and you can't fill the case with cards from NVidia to make it a CUDA-monster or handle graphics beyond the (impressive) abilities of the combined CPU/GPU.
Exactly this. Apple neutered the Mac Pro by making all of its additional functionality useless.
[...]
More than that, the Apple Silicon Mac Pro is a sad toy that was never truly worthy of the Mac Pro name by any stretch of the imagination. It doesn't even have ECC memory or upgradable RAM. IMO, Apple really should have just been honest with its pro users and said "We no longer care about you," and then they should have dropped the Mac Pro as part of the Apple Silicon transition, rather than shipping something so massively downgraded that is so many miles from being a true pro desktop machine.
Anyone who is even slightly surprised by it being discontinued was obviously not paying attention.
I disagree with Apple really should have just been honest with its pro users and said "We no longer care about you,"'.They've abandoned a very specific and shrinking segment of pro users, but the vast majority of pro users are covered by today's lineup with Mac Studio at the top. There just aren't that many things which need a traditional tower anymore. And I'd argue that almost no-one needed the Mac Pro - as you excellently explain.
One minor peeve - what is "pro" today? Most office workers can do their wor
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I believe that the Mac Studio fills up the role of the Pro, via the M5 Max and M4 Ultra. In most head to head performance tests, they've been trouncing Windows, be it on Ryzens, Core Ultras or Snapdragons
I think the Mac Pro - particularly the trashcan - was excellent, and any PC company - maybe Framework? - can recreate it, albeit w/ different configurations. Have a motherboard where one has a choice of either Xeons or Core Ultras, have a memory card that has slots for both DRAM as well as SSDs. The th
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I believe that the Mac Studio fills up the role of the Pro, via the M5 Max and M4 Ultra. In most head to head performance tests, they've been trouncing Windows, be it on Ryzens, Core Ultras or Snapdragons
CPU performance. Now compare GPU performance against a PC built out with eight GPUs to do parallel 3D rendering.
I think the Mac Pro - particularly the trashcan - was excellent
The trash can was thermally limited by its design, and could never be upgraded to hold newer CPUs or GPUs. Anyone for whom the trash can Mac Pro would work could just as easily use an Apple Studio, give or take, ignoring the lack of ECC (which the Apple Silicon Mac Pro also lacked).
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It was thermally limited then, but newer generations of both CPUs and GPUs consume way less power. So if they were retrofitted into a similarly designed trashcan - maybe w/ a bigger circumference - they'd probably work better today. Even ignoring the M-series, if one fitted it w/ a Panther Lake or one of the newest Xeons w/ fewer cores, one would still get a great workstation
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You're using it for exactly the right purpose - for VMs. If used as a mac. even an M1 would destroy it! But as a platform to run VMs of one or more x86 based OSs, it's a very good solution. Icing on the cake: that can include x86-based macOS VMs as well, w/o needing Hackintosh-like VMs
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I disagree with Apple really should have just been honest with its pro users and said "We no longer care about you,"'.They've abandoned a very specific and shrinking segment of pro users, but the vast majority of pro users are covered by today's lineup with Mac Studio at the top.
Depends on what you mean by covered. Can they do their work? Yes. Are they negatively impacted by hardware limitations? Also yes. A lot of professionals would be willing to pay extra for ECC. The fact that Apple doesn't offer ECC makes their machines less than ideal for use cases where a crash would be expensive. The fact that a lot of pros put up with crashes doesn't mean they like the situation. It just means that they dislike it less than switching platforms and tools.
But the pro users I was spec
Re: the last mac pro had an big upchange for very (Score:1)
I wonder if they'll ever re-release it? (Score:2)
It's been through several major design changes, maybe it'll get re-released with a more "classic" design sometime down the road?
Mac Studio is a redesigned Mac Pro (Score:1)
It's been through several major design changes, maybe it'll get re-released with a more "classic" design sometime down the road?
I think the Studio is such a redesigned Pro.
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The Studio is a sealed box, I don't see how it's remotely like the pro. Anything from additional drives to graphics cards have to be plugged into its external TB slots.
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The Studio is a sealed box ...
That was the redesign.
... I don't see how it's remotely like the pro. Anything from additional drives to graphics cards have to be plugged into its external TB slots.
The discrete graphics card situation is not like the PC's. First, you were severely limited as to what cards you could drop in, drivers were quite rare. And became even more rare when Pros moved to Apple Silicon. Secondly, the Pro's open architecture is primarily from Intel days. Before Apple had highly capable GPUs sitting on that Apple Silicon's unified memory.
Those drives were connected using what SATA III? So 6 GB/s. Wouldn't an external on a USB-C 10 GB/s connector be faster?
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They have dual Xeon, can go to 4TB of ram, and have 3 PCIE-16 slots. Now, some people are going to say "Who needs 4TB of RAM?" and I will reply with: If you have to ask, you aren't the target market for those, and that is kind of the point.
CPUs, the M3 Ultra and M4 Max based Studios will be just fine. Unless you are running a Windows Intel VM. However if you are running a Windows !! ARM VM then running Windows is not a problem.
PCIE, its PCIE3 in those Intel based Pros. Those GPUs will be quite dated. The 80 GPU cores attached to unified memory in the Studio's 800 GB/s RAM will likely not be a problem.
RAM, it was a simple business decision. That the market niche that needed more the 256 GB was too small.
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RAM, it was a simple business decision. That the market niche that needed more the 256 GB was too small.
Right... so they abandoned that target market. That is the actual "Pro" machine market.
No, that is a niche of the pro market.
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This is the full configuration with both Intel Xeon processors installed:
4 × PCIe 5.0 x16 (full height, full length, up to 75W, double-width capable in some positions)
4 × PCIe 4.0 x16 (full height, full length, up
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>> The Studio is a sealed box ...
> That was the redesign.
No, because Apple already had sealed boxes. Why not claim the MacBook Neo is a "redesign" of the Mac Pro then? "Yeah the lower spec, and built in keyboard and screen, is part of the redesign"
> The discrete graphics card situation is not like the PC's. First, you were severely limited as to
Blah blah blah.
The Mac Pro specifically existed so that these features were available. The fact Apple was fucking them up meant Apple needed to address t
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>> The Studio is a sealed box ...
> That was the redesign.
No, because Apple already had sealed boxes.
The mini was not Pro alternative. The Studio is.
The Mac Pro specifically existed so that these features were available.
Partially, there was also the high performance feature. The Studio fills that role. Which in the redesign was considered a feature to continue, unlike the other features which were more a legacy of Intel days and not really necessary anymore.
You're seriously arguing that the feature people are looking at when they say they want internal drive bays is the connector?
Yes, because is those old Intel days no external connector could compete with SATA III. But that is no longer the case with modern Apple Silicon based Macs and their thunderbolt connectors.
If anything Apple is returning
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Thunderbolt (4 etc) has been leading to things like external graphics cards and external PCI slot boxes hitting the market. This may end up taking a significant share of the "expandability" crowd away from the "internal upgrades" market.
I see this as especially significant with laptops. For years I've been using a large thunderbolt dock with my laptop at home, making it a pretty good desktop machine when I'm at home. It adds a 24" display, big external speakers and bass, camera, conference mic, external
Re: Mac Studio is a redesigned Mac Pro (Score:2)
Too much latency for RAM.
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maybe not? Look at cache for example, there's L1, L2, and L3, each getting bigger and slower. Just because L2 is slower doesn't mean it doesn't get used.
Or look at some of the older storage techniques like hybrid drives. (such as 1tb of spinning platters, with 32gb of ssd)
Modern SSDs are even doing that. Watch the IO speed when you write a large file, see how it's fast to a point and then gets slow? that's a write buffer getting filled up.
Maybe the same technique could be used with ram, basically on the
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I'd think the M5 Max would be the go-to computer for anyone looking for a Mac Pro. It's the top of the line CPU (for now), so upgrading it is redundant. Then there is the question of whether the memory, the storage, the GPU and the NPU are upgradabale, and if those are top of the line as well, then that too would be
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But even the Mac Studio doesn't have PCIe expansion slots. So one would need to max out on what one is buying upfront
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But even the Mac Studio doesn't have PCIe expansion slots. So one would need to max out on what one is buying upfront
Yes, a $300 processor upgrade on the M4 Max to go from CPU/GPU cores 14/32 to 16/40;
and a $1,5000 upgrade on the M3 Ultra to go from 28/60 to 32/80.
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Apple is known for going back and forth on things, so it would not surprise me if they brining it back at some point when they get someone in charge who is not as enamored with the studio's design philosophy.
will apple lock down 3rd storage card flash swaps (Score:3)
will apple lock down 3rd party storage card flash swaps in the next studio?
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I would hope not. Apple will apple I guess, but they are probably well aware that extensibility is a marketing plus not a negative , particularly with tech crowd, I'd argue in recent times a lot of the lock down has had more to do with manufacturing and performance efficiencies and that it has actually harmed them commercially, and they know it, but the commercial harm is outweighed by the manufacturing savings as well as the general speediness of on-chip memory. That said I *think* the latest mac minis can
The Mac Pro died in 2019 (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple's Mac Pro, and before that the Power Mac, used to be a reasonably affordable machine for the capabilities it offered. The trash can was silly, but still affordable.
The 2019 return to tower form also came with an insane price increase. The base price was double that of previous generations. That killed the Mac Pro.
It's about time they finally had the funeral.
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Apple has never offered a product that justified a large chassis. It used to be lots of slots, hard drives and other storage that justified it. Macs have never been about that, and those days are long gone.
"...used to be a reasonably affordable machine for the capabilities it offered."
No, for the reasons above. Macs never offered these capabilities before and doesn't now. Apple's vision has always been a "Studio", a "trash can", the big desk side chassis with 4 hard drive bays never made sense.
Re: The Mac Pro died in 2019 (Score:4, Interesting)
Going to have to agree to disagree. I still have a MacPro5,1 from 2012 that I regularly use. All four drive trays are in use, both optical drive bays, and I have two PCI addon cards for added functionality. The expansion capabilities of the MacPro5,1 were absolutely useful and justified.
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I had one of those back in the day where I had dropped in a firmware flashed Nvidia GPU, with a small secondary power supply stashed in the second optical bay.
That thing destroyed almost any other similarly priced workstation for years.
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Re: The Mac Pro died in 2019 (Score:2)
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Going to have to agree to disagree. I still have a MacPro5,1 from 2012 that I regularly use. All four drive trays are in use, both optical drive bays, and I have two PCI addon cards for added functionality. The expansion capabilities of the MacPro5,1 were absolutely useful and justified.
Your generation of hardware probably got some decent upgrades for $700.
Apple was charging that much just for the fucking wheels on the new hardware. Which is akin to Apple putting on some soft iMusic and a blindfold over Apples wallet in order to fuck Apple hard in the profit hole, with not even a hint of iLube.
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I just added the fifth hard drive to my 2010 Mac Pro. Besides the video card it also have a USB 3 card and an NVME to PCI card. It works fine, I even got Fedora to talk to the old Broadcom WiFi card.
Re: The Mac Pro died in 2019 (Score:2)
"Apple has never offered a product that justified a large chassis. It used to be lots of slots, hard drives and other storage that justified it. Macs have never been about that"
I see you don't remember the 68k Macs OR the PPC Macs. Apple offered machines with lots of slots ever since the Macintosh II line. HTH.
the 2019 had bad base pricing / hardware choices (Score:2)
the 2019 had bad base pricing / hardware choices
I know the trash can had a lot of different models (Score:2)
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But I seem to remember them all being pretty crazy expensive for what you got. I guess it would be probably quieter than the equivalent Windows PC or hackintosh but most of the models I see out in the wild are the really expensive ones that would have sold for $5,000 and up
They were targeted as a workstation, not a "Mac in a PC-like chassis for home". So they had Intel Xeon CPUs, AMDs workstation line of GPUs, ECC memory etc.When looking at similar offerings, they weren't priced that bad.
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Apple's Mac Pro, and before that the Power Mac, used to be a reasonably affordable machine for the capabilities it offered. The trash can was silly, but still affordable.
How was the trashcan affordable? In 2013, it cost $10,000, for a Xeon, 16GB of RAM and I forget how much storage. I'm not sure that the AMD GPUs that it had - the D300, D500 & D700 were top of the line either
However, I did think it was a cute design. Only issue - on the Upgradability, they should have had for the 3 boards - 1 motherboard w/ the CPU, 1 GPU board and 1 board for the memories - both RAM and storage. Although today, w/ the increased speeds and the North Bridge pretty much merged w/ th
Nobody (Score:2)
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So what?
Yes, you can configure a ridiculous thing that nobody will buy from other manufacturers. And guess what? Those guys don't sell those ridiculous configurations either. But for them it's just options on top of the base config that everyone does buy.
For Apple it's an entire product line.
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The market for expansion cards has definitely slipped.
(And this doesn't compare to running the full model on the NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 machine, but it is what it is.)
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To be fair, outside of GPUs there really isn't much need for third party cards, and arguably even GPUs aren't a show stopper with third party GPU cages. But really for 99% of the use cases the Apple silicon GPUs are good enough. Nobody sane is buying a mac pro to run games, and for AI thats a whole different complicated set of reasonings (for training you'll always be better off with a datacenter server and abank $15K datacenter GPUs.). For everything else, the Apple silicon GPU seems to punch above its we
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To be fair, outside of GPUs there really isn't much need for third party cards, and arguably even GPUs aren't a show stopper with third party GPU cages.
And Apple's total lack of third-party GPU support on Apple Silicon (beyond a few kludges that use them for AI workloads, but no display), losing the current Mac Pro is no great loss. :-)
And yeah, the BlackMagic stuff I've bought lately is Thunderbolt. Also, most of the software for things like real-time switching runs on Windows anyway, so I'd imagine the market for that on Mac is not huge. And so much stuff gets brought in over networks these days (NDI, SRT, etc.) that HDMI ingest probably isn't that int
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Eh traditionall the big "need many hdmi" tasks was multicamera editing.
I know that at some point Multi Camera support got broken or removed but apparently it came back? Honestly its been a long long time since i've been anything close to knowledable about FCP
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Eh traditionall the big "need many hdmi" tasks was multicamera editing.
I know that at some point Multi Camera support got broken or removed but apparently it came back? Honestly its been a long long time since i've been anything close to knowledable about FCP
Oh. Today I learned that FCP regained live multicamera switching support in 2024... four years after everybody stopped caring and started using OBS, vMix, or Tricaster.
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Yeah, unless the 'everything cloud' push springs back, which is unlikely given how lucrative it has been, I can not imagine a return to high priced desktops. My company is trying ot move us all to sub 1k laptops with the idea that 'everything can be done in cloud VMs instead!'.
Not nobody, but close! (Was: Re:Nobody) (Score:2)
Definitely not “nobody”, but for sure “not enough to build a business on it”, the more surprising conclusion is “not really enough people to make expensive configurations of something that is basically an existing system”, at least not if you are Apple blunts the surprise a bit.
Apple discontinues a lot of things that other companies could survive on as a sole product. The iPod mini when the nano came out, the iPod Touchok, maybe just products with the name “iPod
I need to run out and buy all the remaining ones.. (Score:3)
Can we get an XServe instead? (Score:3)
Since the Mac Pro is gone, can we get an XServe instead? There are still a number of business cases where Macs that are easy to rackmount without needing special third party stuff are important. Of course, one can toss a number of Mac Minis onto a shelf, but that isn't really enterprise tier.
XServes were one of the best 1U servers made. Ironically for a time, Apple was #1 in the storage front because companies used those combined with rebranded Promise arrays, until Apple decided to not bother with the enterprise.
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My 2009 Mac Pro lumbers on (Score:4, Interesting)
The video card has been upgraded. The USB ports have been upgraded. The optical drive was upgraded. The drives have been upgraded repeatedly. The RAM has been upgraded. The ROM was flashed to a (slightly) newer version. It's running 24/7/365 in an unheated garage and I figure I'll keep it in its current role until it finally dies, at which point it will probably be replaceable by a $50 Raspberry Pi.
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You'll probably save $50 per year or more in electricity costs by switching to a Pi.
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More like $50 per month, at least.
Re: My 2009 Mac Pro lumbers on (Score:3)
When prices of electricity first went up a few years ago, I calculated my 2010 was using £50 per month. Replaced it with an M1 Mac mini at £5/month. Sad to turn off that beast but it's so expensive to run (and so very slow compared to Apple Silicon). It was all maxed out, including USB 3, eSATa expansions.
Xgrid type cluster for Pro users? (Score:2)
When a M4 Mac Mini Pro $599 is just as good.... (Score:2)
The new button on that page (Score:2)
It doesn't say Buy, it says Bury
Pretty Much Redundant (Score:2)
Especially with the upcoming M5 Max (and Ultra?) Mac Studio the Mac Pro with its eight (pretty much useless) PCIe slots is the odd one out. It doesn't make sense with the tightly integrated Apple Silicon chips, and unless they were going to make a whole separate line of more modular M-series chips for the high end it really doesn't have a place in the lineup that makes sense. I guess they could have considered putting M5 Max chips on daughterboards and made a motherboard with multiple slots for them, but i
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Very true! I wonder what sort of uses could 8 PCI slots have? I guess a couple or so for SSDs, but beyond that? Network cards? Most of the add-on cards that existed back in the day - SCSI cards, sound cards, etc are extinct
Also, what were the typical use cases for the Mac Pro? Video editing?
Wait (Score:2)
Its an AI platform (Score:2)
They accidentally stumbled on creating a great platform for the price and setup of an LLM platform.