Why Does the M2 Mac Pro Exist?

In a world where you can get the exact same performance from a computer half the price... what's the point?

~

[MrJ]

Because it has the biggest Apple logo.

[mscaldwell_dop]

As other industry people have stated, the PCIE slots for specialist A/V cards might have been useful when M1 Studio launched but because it wasn’t, a lot of those devices were either replaced with TB3 versions or they got put in a Ext box, so the Mac Pro audience is now even smaller than it would have been.

[dgschrei]

The problem with those PCIe slots is that it may well offer 8 PCIe slots, but the M2 doesn't have nearly enough PCIe lanes to drive all those slots directly. So instead those slots are behind PCIe switches and effectively share bandwidth with each other. (Like old 4-way SLI motherboards on the PC side used to do).

Which for Marques's use case isn't too bad because he's only going to use 1 16x card. (the bigger problem there is the slots only being PCIe4 when intel has been shipping PCIe5 for almost 2 years now)
but if you're some broadcasting customer like many in the comments keep bringing up as the intended use case for this machine you are in for a rude awakeing.
Because those customers rely on their 4k capture cards not fighting for bandwidth with their 100gb network card and their fiber connection to the SAN.
Same goes for any audio engineers that want to put their PCIe based audio gear for their 2019 Mac pro rack version into this machine. Those PCIe switches basically need to turn off the PCIe lanes for one card for a tiny fraction of a second to give the other card access and vice versa. That introduces latency and any form of latency is an absolute killer for any professional audio workflow.

[pcislocked]

That fan going all loud is a pretty common practice with server hardware actually, to ensure chip doesn't overheat since you removed the case and possibly might remove airflow shrouds.

[TimidSylveon]

Shot in the dark: because it took longer than expected and they have a direct product cannibalising it, I’m going to assume that they did have a faster, bigger chip for it that they couldn’t get to work; this being their fallback.

[digitalrainstorm]

For those wondering just what kind of sound cards you might put in an M2 Mac Pro. AVID HDX cards are hugely important to film and television post production where 2-3 Mac Pros will be connected together with these cards to provide all the low latency audio processing necaseary for mixing movies and TV. There are also other high bandwidth (128+ channel) MADI / Sync cards that allow composers to offload some of the work of virtual orchestras to secondary machines. There may not be many customers for this product but the ones that do exsist are likely to be buying multiple if not fleets of these for studios and workspaces

[danielbass]

0:30 what a great way to show the different chips in all the configs of the different machines!!

[slunasaurusrex]

The old G5 cheese grater towers would spin up the fans to max if you took the side cover off with it running as well... It's a safety thing to make sure it gets airflow when the fans are partially blocked, or in the case of the G5 when the side panel was off and the air wasn't directed around the components as designed.

[Xaluber]

My PowerMac G5 Quad does the same thing with the fans if you open the case with it running. It's because the internals are designed around individual thermal chambers and the airflow is no longer directed properly if you open the case, so it speeds up the fans to account for that.

[RyanSoltani]

For those who didn’t watch throughout, at 5:09 he says it exists just for PCI slots so there ya go

[mariusreiter]

I think main reason why this exists aside from a handful of niche cases where it's actually needed is because there are enough people who will just buy it because it's the most expensive product in their line-up. And most buyers will never use the expansion slots. It's kind of the SUV of the computer world. It's bigger, heavier, more expensive, but 95% of owners never actually take it off-road and would be better off buying an estate car. But it makes them feel good to own a product that is superior in their minds.

[digitalclips]

The high end Macs have always been called into question dating back to the MacII fx. They exist for a few reasons; I suspect Apple use them, companies that use high end equipment use them and they are good PR for the lower end Macs. Back in the 1990s when a Mac II fx, tricked out, was $12, 000 most people just laughed, especially so called experts in the media. My company put them into printing companies and newspapers in droves. In those places the cost of the Mac was low compared to other equipment they used, and the ROI was huge.

[ClockBestEvent]

It exists so that the Mac Studio can seem like a good purchase

[mingistech]

Tons of TV and local news stations across the country have been waiting for this new Mac Pro to drop. They load them up with AJA cards for capture and fiber cards for their SAN. I worked for a company that setup these Macs at hundreds of these locations across the US. This system is a big deal for them.

[xXCrimsonWolfXx]

If I was someone that was waiting eagerly for the Mac Pro to have the M-series chips, I would have been pissed that this is what they released. It's insane that Apple didn't show off any expansion cards, like extra GPU cores or maybe extra Neural Engine cores. You can get the Mac Studio with every single thing maxed out and it would still be less than the starting price of the Pro, and at 1/10 the physical footprint.

[Dlo]

Composer here—music, that is. I’ve honestly had mixed feelings about Apple silicon; the performance is great and for base-level Macs, and the capacity that M1 and M2 have delivered has been stunning compared to base-level Intel options. But as someone who relies solely on CPU and RAM for their workloads, I feel like I can’t really find a machine that fits my needs unless I end up paying for a lot of superfluous GPU performance. I would love to see a variant of the Max where they pile on the CPU capacity instead of adding more GPU muscle; I might’ve considered Pro but 32 GB of RAM just isn’t enough.

[wb]

I work in IT for a company spanning multiple countries that does stuff with video, DO NOT STOP USING EXTERNAL BACKUPS. Connect the NAS to the network and set up automatic backups. You really don't want all your data to go poof if something catastrophic happens to your main machine. We even go as far as backing up all of our projects to s3 buckets and then move them to Amazon Glacier for old projects.

[kylecoolky]

When you try to take the case off the Mac Pro, it ramps up the fans to make sure air flows over the parts it needs to while being in the open air. It’s similar to blowing down a tube at something far away vs blowing at it in the open. You need to blow harder in the open.

And the last one actually did do that. I believe Snazzy Labs was one of the first to discover that when he hacked the case off it while keeping it plugged in.

[alphaspace]

it's kinda weird how the M1 ultra was pretty decent at launch, with top-tier CPU-performance and mid-level gpu performance and now the M2 is just 15% faster while intel and AMD have increased performance by 40% for CPUs and Nvidia and AMD nearly doubled the GPU performance...

[deanwilliams]

I'm going against Marques and saying that even with his workflow he does not need the new Mac Pro. Like many have said the Mac Pro is such a niche that even specialized cards have moved to external TB3 connections. I doubt they will design two versions just for the Mac Pro crowd. To make the Mac Pro special they need to get it to upgradable memory over 1TB and something like two M2 Ultra chips. All of this with the current base price would make it somewhat justifiable to be 3k over the Mac Studio.