Comment by lapcat
21 hours ago
The 2013 trash can was the end of the Mac Pro. It was never the same after that. The 2012 and earlier Mac Pros were awesome. I had a 2010 model. Here's what I loved:
• Multiple hard drive bays for easy swapping of disks, with a side panel that the user could open and close
• Expandable RAM
• Lots of ports, including audio
• The tower took up no desktop space
• It was relatively affordable, starting at $2500. Many software developers had one. (The 2019 and later Mac Pros were insanely expensive, starting at $6000.)
The Mac Studio is affordable, but it lacks those other features. It has more ports than other Macs but fewer in number and kind than the old Mac Pro, because the Mac Studio is a pointlessly small desktop instead of floor tower.
That's when they stopped designing computers for the pro market and started selling mid-century Danish furniture that can also edit videos.
I knew it was all over when third party companies had to develop the necessarily-awkward rack mount kits for those contraptions. If Apple actually cared about or understood their pro customers, they would have built a first party solution for their needs. Like sell an actual rack-mount computer again—the horror!
Instead, an editing suite got what looked like my bathroom wastebasket.
When it was introduced, Apple said the trash can was a revolution in cooling design.
Then they said they couldn't upgrade the components because of heat. Everyone knows that wasn't true.
By the time Apple said they had issues with it in 2017, AMD were offering 14nm GCN4 and 5 graphics (Polaris and Vega) compared to the 28nm GCN1 graphics in the FirePro range. Intel had moved from Ivy Bridge to Skylake for Xeons. And if they wanted to be really bold (doubtful, as the move to ARM was coming) then the 1st gen Epyc was on the market too.
Moore's Law didn't stop applying for 6 years. They had options and chose to abandon their flagship product (and most loyal customers) instead.
The biggest issue was actually that the Mac Pro was designed specifically for dual GPUs- in the era of SLI this made some sense, but once that technology was abandoned it was a technological dead-end.
If you take one apart you'll see why, it's not the case that you could have ever swapped around the components to make it dual-CPU instead; it really was "dual GPU or bust".
Somewhat ironically, in todays ML ecosystem, that architecture would probably do great. Though I doubt it could possibly do better than what the M-series is doing by itself using unified memory.
I'll admit that while I've used the trash can but never taken it apart myself. But I can't imagine it would have been impossible to throw 2x Polaris 10 GPUs on the daughterboards in place of the FirePros.
2 replies →
Aside from the GPU mess, the 2013 was a nice machine, basically a proto-Mac Studio. Aside from software, the only thing that pushed me off my D300/64GB/12-core as an everyday desktop + front-end machine is the fact that there's no economically sensible way to get 4K video at 120 Hz given that an eGPU enclosure + a decent AMD GPU would cost as much as a Mac mini, so I'm slumming it in Windows for a few months until the smoke clears from the next Mac Studio announcement.
At which point I'll decide whether to replace my Mac Pro with a Mac Studio or a Linux workstation; honestly, I'm about 60/40 leaning towards Linux at this point, in which case I'd also buy a lower-end Mac, probably a MacBook Air.
I'm in the Linux desktop / Mac laptop camp, and it works well for me. Prevents me getting too tied up in any one ecosystem so that I can jump ship if Apple start releasing duds again.
The studio is also like 5x as fast as those machines.
What's your point? Of course processors have gotten a lot faster between 2012 and 2025.
I was talking about the form factor of the machine.