(click sound) (sliding sound) (upbeat music)
- With Apple transitioning their Mac lineup to run in their own homegrown Silicon,
what we've seen is a substantial miniaturization of their lineup.
Just look at the new iMac. It demonstrates just how far they are willing
to slim things. It's a nice computer,
but it calls into question the direction the company will take with their professional lineup.
Rumors have been swirling and they indicate that not even Apple's next hyper powerful Mac Pro
will be spared from the shrinking. And I think it's worth exploring what that could mean.
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The story of the two compact professional Macs from the company's history is relevant to this discussion
because they weren't well-received. And since the next Mac Pro will undoubtedly be smaller
than the present one, it's possible that it could suffer the same pitfalls as those from the past.
The two machines I'm speaking about are of course, the G4 Cube and the 2013 Mac Pro.
Remember those? Oh, I do.
They both had a lot in common, both introduce stunning visual designs,
unlike anything we expected from a computer before, and I'll never forget the retracting handle of the Cube
and just being mesmerized at a cylindrical computer.
- Hint, innovate any more, my ass. (crowd laughing)
- These compact designs had to re-imagine how a computer can be cooled.
The G4 Cube was designed to be passively cooled by convection.
This means the hot air captured by the heat sink would rise up and cold air would rush in from the bottom
to replace it, a clever design, but the more expensive Cube
still didn't perform as well as the large and loud Power Mac.
2013 Trash Can Pro met a similar fate, with its unified triangular heat sink and single fan.
It proved to not be enough to cool a CPU and two GPU's
and eventually Apple put the Mac Pro into a service program.
The other thing that graded professionals was that it offered little in the way of expansion,
unless you wanted to hang a cable octopus off the back.
In a round table discussion with reporters in 2018, Apple explained that they recognize these past shortcomings,
and a year later gave us this, the 2019 Mac Pro.
(bouncy upbeat music)
Reverting back to the traditional tower form, it is a thermal beast and allows for a degree of expansion
and upgradability not seen in Apple since the 90s.
There are 12 DDR4 slots for up to 1.5 terabytes of RAM
and the optional to discard drive cage, easy to access Thunderbolt ports on top
and eight PCIe slots that you can fill to your heart's content.
One more MVMe storage, slap that in there, need HDX accelerator for Pro Tools? Just slide it in.
Need a capture card or playback card? Put that in, the sky's the limit.
(upbeat music fading) Unfortunately, the sky has also been the limit
for the power consumption of Intel's high-performance processors
for the last several years. It's almost certain that the new desktop will use a larger,
more powerful successor to the M1 SoC that launched inside every new Mac
since the end of last year. Rumors suggest the upcoming Mac Pro's new chip
will be called M1X and have up to 40 CPU cores.
And with their current focus on performance per watt and energy efficiency,
there's little doubt that the ARM Mac Pro will be smaller than the current one.
So what could that look like?
Some unofficial renders show that it might channel the nostalgic feeling of the G4 Cube.
Well, others imagine it as a triple high Mac Mini, which would be kind of boring.
Or it might even maintain the appearance of this beauty.
Though, I hope that it has a single centrally placed handle at the top, like a suitcase.
None of these would be as interesting as if Apple were to give a completely new industrial design
heralding their new era of homegrown Silicon.
Regardless, I worry that going with such a small form factor
could limit the expansion that has earned them so much praise from professional users.
But maybe it can be shrunk without upsetting the community.
Let's take a crack at it. (click sound) But before we do, allow me to inform you
that this video is brought to you by Tunabelly Softwares, TG Pro.
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To integrate any computer into the workflow, many pros need at least a couple of PCIe slots
be it for a capture card, audio interface, or to add more storage.
So in my opinion, the next Mac Pro still needs to have enough width and length
to accommodate full-size cards. We'll get more in depth on that in a minute.
I also hope there remains easy access to the internals.
Apple's Pro desktops have been always remarkably and ingeniously accessible,
say for the now discontinued iMac Pro, which was a bit more of a nightmare.
So it should remain here. What about CPU upgradability though?
Rumors point to a choice between a 20 core model or 40 core model.
That sounds impressive today, but what about it in another six years time?
Back in the days of the early 2009 Mac Pro, it was not only possible to eBay higher end chip later on
down the road, but users found they could even flash the Firmware,
enabling support for the next generation of processors
on their older machines. So, could Apple possibly offer SoC upgrades
in the years to come? No, probably not.
On all M1 Max, not only is the SoC soldered
onto logic board, but the system memory and even the storage
are permanently installed in the same manner. So it's more likely we'll see more of the same,
making it a good strategy to purchase the most powerful config you can afford,
so that your machine can keep pace with the ever evolving demands of your business
for years to come. The issue of RAM brings up a more interesting question mark,
the new unified RAM system in the current M1 Max come in two possible configurations, 8 or 16 gigabytes.
That's obviously not enough for many professional users, so the question is,
how will Apple offer more? Or even crazier, whether there's space for a hybrid design
with unified RAM on the SoC and extra slots for DDR4 dims?
The integrated RAM is faster than anything you can plug in, but it's still nice to have the option to extend
the lifespan of your machine. (click sound) The other big unknown is whether adding graphics cards
will be supported, even if there is space to slot one in,
because right now, Apple Silicon can't even talk to external GPU's
and all the graphics processing happens on cores integrated in the SoC.
Apple has supported dual GPU setups before, either switching between them or using them in tandem
for compatible workloads. But the latter has only been possible
with two similar cards, like an onboard radio on GPU and a second one in a PCI slot
or a Thunderbolt enclosure. And even if we assume it's going to have support
for an add in graphics card, I'll eat my hat if it uses MPX.
Of course, we also don't know whether we'll even need
a graphics card. The rumors claim Apple is working on some huge integrated GPU's
with 64 or even 128 cores, that could be multiple times faster
than the current AMD cards that are available with the 2019 Mac Pro.
Still I'd love to have the option to upgrade or supplement in the future,
whether it's with a Radeon or some kind of Apple design accelerator.
Could look like something like the Afterburner card, which like, who is it for?
It just does ProRes decoding. I work at LMG and I can't even take advantage of it
without really trying. Finally, let's talk about Apple's approach to IO.
The current M1 line, particularly the iMac,
has fewer ports and supports fewer external displays
compared to Apple's Intel powered machines. I hope their new Mac Pro gets at least
the same ports from the 2017 iMac Pro, four USB-C, four USB-A, one 10 gig Ethernet,
one SD card reader and support for more than two monitors.
Apple has demonstrated with this big boy that they do care about integrating
into professionals workflows more flexibly, but by golly,
this new ARM Silicon leaves so many questions open about how they plan on scaling the technology
for those workloads. We still haven't even seen what a larger,
more powerful MacBook Pro and iMac looks like,
but those are pretty straightforward to imagine, with the Mac Pro though,
Apple's history of veering between two very opposite extremes
makes me very interested to see if the company will be able to balance them.
(drum music) Thanks for tuning into this Mac Address.
Now I am aware there is a very fresh rumor that says that this Mac Pro
is actually gonna get a spec bump, which is interesting. I imagine what we're gonna actually see
is kind of a transition period with a bit of overlap between your Mac Pro
and the Intel Mac Pro. But I'm curious what you think, make sure to like, subscribe and comment below.