Comment by dangus
1 day ago
> Serviceable, repairable, upgradable Macs are officially a thing of the past.
Well, not exactly. Apple’s desktop Macs actually all have modular SSD storage, and third parties sell upgrade kits. And it’s not like Thunderbolt is a slouch as far as expandability.
I can see why the Mac Pro is gone. Yeah, it has PCIe slots…that I don’t really think anyone is using. It’s not like you can drop an RTX 5090 in there.
The latest Mac Pro didn’t have upgradable memory so it wasn’t much different than a Mac Studio with a bunch of empty space inside.
The Mac Studio is very obviously a better buy for someone looking for a system like that. It’s just hard to imagine who the Mac Pro is for at its pricing and size.
I think what happened is that the Studio totally cannibalized Mac Pro sales.
Thunderbolt absolutely is a slouch.
Every PCIe card I have requires it's own $150+ PCIe to Thunderbolt Dock and its own picoPSU plus 12V power supply.
External PCIe is convenient for portables. Not for desktops. It's a piss-poor replacement for a proper PCIe slot.
Apparently the Neo is surprisingly repairable - in that parts can be replaced, not that you can buy stuff at Microcenter or Fry's (RIP) and shove them in.
> Apple’s desktop Macs actually all have modular SSD storage
"Modular" does not mean that it's serviceable, repairable or upgradable. Apple's refusal to adopt basic M.2 spec is a pretty glaring example of that.
> Apple's refusal to adopt basic M.2 spec
I get the ideological angle, but in practical terms that's not a barrier: https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-apple-ssd-adapter.html...
Those are all for Intel Macs, and not even the recent Intel Macs. You can't use a passive adapter to put a NVMe SSD into a current Mac like you could a decade ago, because back then the only thing non-standard about the SSD was the connector. Now most of the SSD controller itself has moved to the SoC and trying to put an off the shelf SSD into the current slot makes no more sense than trying to put an SSD into a DIMM slot.
This is the USB-C dongle argument all over again, but with a proprietary connector that a total of one (1) company uses.
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It's sad that "you can replace the SSD" is in some people's eyes "serviceable, repairable, and upgradeable".
We should demand better of our computer-manufacturing overlords.
> It’s not like you can drop an RTX 5090 in there.
Why not? Oh, right, because Apple won't let you. Sad.
I didn’t phrase myself very well. What I’m saying is that the loss of the Mac Pro didn’t reduce the repairability or modularity at all in the product lineup.
It was exactly as modular as the Mac mini and Mac Studio.
The only difference is that it had some PCIe slots that basically had no use since you couldn’t throw a GPU in there, and because thunderbolt 5 exists.
Yeah, sure, there were some niche PCIe things that two people probably used. Hence the discontinuation.
I am an ex-Mac user, I own a Framework. Don’t worry, you’re preaching to the choir.