It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.
Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.
↫ Chance Miller at 9To5Mac
If a Mac Pro falls in the back of the Apple Store and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
The Mac Studio is the way forward, for them. But they should have kept the rack version of the Mac Pro.
My Mac studio M2 was the only computer I’ve ever used that had compatibility issues with some USBC cables.. If it was a PC, I would have returned it earlier
Also owned a much older Mac pro (first gen). The video card was terrible and the Fully buffered ram was rediculous
So happy I’ve moved back to PC and Fedora. Took ages to sort out my workflow, but its the same as Mac now.
The only other premium build I’d likely consider at this time is the system 76 with ampere honestly
I’ve been bitten by a Mac Studio hardware compatibility bug as well. I had a first gen Mac Studio for a while, bought secondhand on Swappa of course, as I needed a Mac for a specific use case. However, its 10G Ethernet couldn’t even do 1G, negotiating down to 100Mb instead. This was ridiculous for such a powerful machine, and after a ton of troubleshooting — manual settings in the network settings, OS reinstall, connect to a different switch — with no resolution, I took it to the closest Apple store (an hour away) and of course it negotiated 1G just fine on their network. To the tech’s credit, she spent nearly two hours trying to replicate my issue and consulting with her own support team, and she found that this was a common complaint for this specific model, and that the previous owner had faced the same issues as me and actually brought this device to the same Apple store with no resolution. I messaged him on Swappa and he confirmed that he sold it because of the Ethernet issue. He refunded me a bit to compensate for my time spent troubleshooting it since he didn’t disclose this issue in the sale.
Apparently the 10G Ethernet hardware Apple used in the first gen Studio is extremely picky about the brand and capabilities of any switch it’s connected to. I ended up having to buy a pretty expensive 2.5G switch and connecting the Mac to one of the 2.5G ports to get it to negotiate at 1G. I sold the Mac later, not because of this issue but because I was moving away from anything Apple and I didn’t actually need it anymore anyway, but I kept the switch for forward compatibility in case I ever end up with a faster than 1G Internet connection.
That one is on my list if I ever end up with more money than common sense. Not likely to happen, but I can dream!
Morgan,
I know nothing about the hardware but I find that a bit odd.
10gbe SFP+ modules sometimes have vendor eccentricities like this (hardware not wanting to interoperate with equipment from other vendors), but I’ve never heard of or experienced incompatibilities with standard 10gbe ethernet ports. I would think anything that complies with the standard should just work. And in no case should it be degrading to 100mbps. And if you hard code the adapter’s speed, auto negotiation shouldn’t matter.
To my chagrin I’ve found some adapters don’t support IEEE 802.3az EEE, which is particularly bad because 10gbe adapters use a lot of energy and without EEE they never idle. But I’ve never seen a link not work. I’d be disappointed too.
For the better or the worse, computers are madure and becoming more and more a product you buy finished, with some options available when buying.
Most people don’t want to build their cars by buying pieces and putting them together. They buy a finished car choosing a pre-made model and configuration. This seems to be the kind of market Apple is after.
There will always be some market for heavy customization and specialized hardware, you’ll have to look at a different vendor.
In any case, what is really important is to have basic interoperatibility working.
osvil,
When apple designs hardware to not be upgradable/repairable, it’s not because there’s no demand for these things, but that apple preferred consumers not be able to do it. I imagine there were some apple engineers who grumbled, but their orders were clear: customers must not be able to service their own hardware.
Naturally. “Go to a different vendor” is easy to say, but trivializes loosing your OS and all your existing software because macos doesn’t support hardware from any other vendors. It’s not the easiest thing to switch ecosystems, and whether you recommend that be windows or linux, or chromebooks, or whatever, they’re all going to come with different frustrations.
I guess the question when choosing an OS might be: which frustrations are we willing to tolerate the most of.
This ignores the fact that, on Android (where users do have choice of hardware manufacturer), unrepairable designs are also the norm. For example, if there was some kind of huge unmet demand for repairable phones, the Fairphone 5 would be flying of the shelves and have tons of copycats, but it doesn’t.
Unfortunately, for most people (who view gadgets as disposable), repairability is viewed as dead weight that detracts from the compactness and lightness of the device. For example, having a sturdy plastic case for the battery (which is a requirement to have user-replaceable batteries without the manufacturer getting sued for battery fires) adds weight compared to gluing a soft battery to the chassis. Similarly, having everything soldered-on results in massive savings in board thickness and footprint (since you don’t need sturdy edge connectors like the ones SO-DIMMs and MXM modules have). Even on PCs, there is a reason most laptops became MacBook Air-like when the MacBook Air was introduced: it’s because those designs sold like hotcakes.
The only exception is demographics like PC Gamers who don’t view systems as disposable, but that is the exception.
The good news is that we are soon going to get replaceable batteries in most mobile gadgets sold in the EU and this may also benefit other regions, but that’s the result of government regulation (much like the 5mph bumpers in cars in the US were, later dropped to 2.5mph by public demand), not genuine market demand.
kurkosdr,
I was talking about computers rather than phones. Phones require more specialized tools for service. However even within the mobile repair community apple are guilty of intentionally making iphones unrepairable. So if anyone’s keeping score, I’m afraid apple looses points there too.
I agree that not everyone cares about repair-ability, however it does not follow that nobody does. It wouldn’t be so bad if some products were not repairable, but it was extremely regressive for apple to decide that no consumer products shall be repairable/upgradable. Obviously we know it would sell. Sometimes apple’s products are even bulkier than competing devices that are repairable so the whole argument goes out the window. It’s an excuse to make devices non-repairable than a real reason not to. If apple wanted to make their computers repairable they could innovate. It’s just so implausible and frankly insulting to apple’s engineers to suggest they cant think of ways to make their own computers repairable. Of course they could! Their instructions were not to.
While it makes sense to highlight gamers for their high end needs, RAM and disk have been quick and easy upgrades practiced by all kinds of users wanting to extend the usable life of their computers. Apple deciding to make storage irreplaceable is especially egregious. Many customers want it, but it is Apple who are refusing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538946
Looks like Apple no longer sells a computer with PCIExpress expansion ports built in. Very sad.
The expectation from apple from now on is that with TB5, is to go with an external PCIe chassis if you need to use PCIe boards.
Xanady Asem,
Thunderbolt 5 is a huge leap for external bus speeds, but would actually bottleneck a standard PCIE 5 bus supporting 64 GB/s or 512 Gbps…
https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/thunderbolt-5-performance-speed-test/
I haven’t tested it, but going by the specs that’s about 16% of PCIE performance. IMHO the main use case for PCIE is graphics cards. The bandwidth to GPUs would be bottle-necked by thunderbolt. However as I understand it apple has completely stopped support dedicated GPUs in all forms, so I suppose we can just rule those out and pretend they don’t exist.
There is plenty of capacity for ethernet, SSDs, HDMI output/capture, and peripherals of this nature, but if my computer didn’t have PCIE slots I’d rather get peripherals that plug directly into the thunderbolt ports and skip the PCIE enclosure.
So IMHO while thunderbolt 5 is a nice upgrade for peripherals, it’s not terribly useful as a substitute for PCIE.
Apple has not supported discrete GPUs since they moved to Apple Silicon.
I assume their calculus is that TB5 offers enough bandwidth for the remaining specialized PCIe I/O boards supported on macOS.
Xanady Asem,
Yes we agree, but like I said once you rule out the GPU it becomes harder to justify an external PCIe chassis. Get thunderbolt devices instead.
It’s not that there aren’t applications for PCIe cards, but if I were going that route personally, I have a strong preference for a self contained computer featuring PCIe slots than to have a mac studio that requires more external hardware to complete the setup.
The Mac Pro’s PCie boards weren’t intended for GPUs but for specialized audio or video cards for people working in this specific line of work. Discarding the Mac Pro now makes sense with thunderbolt 5 being available but they should release a 19″ rack version of the Mac Studio for professionals.
The other glaring issue with TB5 -> PCIe chassis solutions is cost. A TB4/5 -> eGPU chassis can sometimes costs more than the GPU you’re putting into it, and that’s just one device (and as Xanady Asem said, Apple Silicon Macs don’t support external GPUs anyway). A PCIe chassis that supported, say, three or four devices would likely cost as much as the Mac you’re plugging it into, if not more. Sonnet makes one that holds three PCIe cards for $1200, and that device works with a $600 M4 Mac mini.
That’s just the Apple way; you want a Mac desktop with more than 512GB of storage? You’ll pay more for the extra storage than the base model Mac itself, whether it’s build-to-order with Apple or after the fact with a super expensive external drive array. Long time Mac users expect and understand this inflated cost, but it doesn’t make it right.
The thing is that the mac pro was so over priced, that the combo of a mac studio + external PCIe chassis still comes in cheaper for those customers that require specialized PCIe board support.
Apple follows a pricing ladder that leads most customers to specific configs. Consumer stuff tends to herd customers around the 16GB mem configs. And the pro ladders shifts those customers to the more expensive configs (where businesses are less price conscious for pro seat cost)
Apple is mostly an appliance, services, and content company now.