What is the point of the MacPro?
What is the point of the MacPro?
I fail to see the purpose of a MacPro over a Mac Studio.
I know it has pci slots, but can someone tell me how they will realistically be used? Used in a way that can't be done with thunderbolt.
The pricing seems absurd compared to a Mac Studio.
A lot of media applications where you need audio cards, capture cards, etc.
For just a computer it’s extremely expensive. For multimedia use it can run the workload of a rack of equipment 5x the cost.
It's a pretty niche product and most of the advantages over the Mac Studio are really not consumer facing.
While the cooling solution in the Studio is quite good, the Mac Pro's larger chassis should allow for even better cooling which may allow for greater sustained workloads, such as video transcoding and all types of rendering.
While the Studio makes sense for end-users, if you have have a shop that does distributed computing, rendering, etc. the rack mount option is appealing as you can have all the horsepower and supporting infrastructure, e.g. networking, power, tucked away neatly in a closet as opposed to sprawled across your workspace.
Thunderbolt is great for attaching external consumer storage, but if you have petabytes of video and audio stored on a fibre-channel NAS or DAS, with multiple users accessing it, that's not the type of thing you're going to sustain on people's desktops.
Its primary target is medium to large scale, distributed computing. It's not a high end desktop, it's a server class device.
I agree that the price seems ridiculous. Maybe a 1000 dollar upcharge may make sense but 3000?
At 28:47 in this interview with Apple execs, https://youtu.be/DgLrBSQ6x7E it seems they argue it’s for PCIE expansion, where in audio production or networking potential buyers already have very expensive cards they would like to continue using
Maybe I am wrong as I do not know anything about audio, but I thought that was all done through thunderbolt at this point.
additionally, who is using a mac pro for networking? I think a Linux server would do the trick.
I guess there is a reason or they would not have made it, but I do not see the point. It does look nice.
upgradeability, flexing, setup eye-candy
I was wondering about this.
The most well-known use-case of the Mac Pro is in video editing. Famously, Pixar use Macs Pro to render their movies, so being able to install GPUs is essential. The MP23 doesn't support extra GPUs, either via PCIE or Thunderbolt, so what exactly is the point?
Let’s just say you had a bunch of Audio and video capture card that are pcie. If you wanted to use thunderbolt you’d end up buying multiple pcie to thunderbolt enclosures, have to deal with thunderbolt cables, power cables for the enclosure, and making sure it all is reliable. If you had 3-4 cards that could end up being a mess of wires.
Mac Pro isn’t really targeting normal consumers. It’s a high end product for media professionals. Big companies have budgets for this stuff and professional workstations are expensive regardless of brand.
Yeah, fair enough, this makes sense.
It certainly feels like a legacy concern to some extent though. Like the trashcan Pro was exactly what it needed to be, but people weren’t ready to shift their hardware out to Thunderbolt just yet. Perhaps the next generation of Mac Pro will return to that form factor.
I wonder if there is really not a need for a MacPro at this point, but if they scrapped it, people might thing the ARM chips are not up to the challenge of being a workstation.
I bet we will see it slowly phased out.
Being generous, it's possible that to be able to use the PCIE cards that are compatible with macOS over Thunderbolt, it would end up being more expensive to use a Studio. But yeah, given that Studio and Pro are benchmarking at pretty much the same, it seems like a no-brainer to go with the Studio.