With Apple transitioning their Mac lineup to run on 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. computers 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.
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? Ugh. I do.
They both had a lot in common, both introduced 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, these compact designs had to reimagine 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 heatsink 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's Trashcan Pro met a similar fate with its unified triangular heatsink and single
fan. It proved to not be enough to cool a CPU and two GPUs, 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 roundtable discussion with reporters in 2018, Apple explained that they recognized
these past shortcomings, and a year later gave us this.
The 2019 Mac Pro.
Inverting back to the traditional tower form, it is a thermal beast and allows for a degree
of expansion and upgrade ability not seen in Apple since the 90s.
There are 12 DDR4 slots for up to 1.5 terabytes of RAM, an optional 2-disk hard drive cage,
easy to access Thunderbolt ports on top, and 8 PCIe slots that you can fill to your heart's
content. Want more NVMe storage? Slap that in there.
Need an HDX accelerator for Pro Tools? Just slide it in.
Need a capture card or playback card? Slap that in.
The sky's the limit. 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 G4Cube,
while 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. 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, save for the now
discontinued iMac Pro, which was a bit more of a nightmare.
So it should remain here. What about CPU upgradeability though?
Rumors point to a choice between a 20 core model or 40 core model.
That sounds impressive today, but what about in another 6 years time?
Back in the days of the early 2009 Mac Pro, it was not only possible to eBay a 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 Macs, not only is the SoC soldered onto the 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-involving
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 Macs come in two possible configurations,
8 or 16GB. 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 DIMMs. 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.
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 GPUs, and all of 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 Radeon GPU and a second one in a PCIe slot or Thunderbolt enclosure.
Even if we assume it's going to have support for an adding 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 GPUs 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-designed 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 I.O.
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.
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 going
to get a spec bump. Which is interesting.
Imagine what we're going to actually see is kind of a transition period with a bit of overlap between the ARM Mac Pro and the Intel Mac Pro.
But I'm curious what you think. Make sure to like, subscribe, and comment below.