The Extreme wasn’t really a nerd fever dream as even according to the reports that it’s dead Apple themselves reportedly planned on it and to be frank the Extreme is the only reason for the Pro Tower to exist.
I apologize, I should have specified that I wasn't talking about the "Extreme". In fact, I had been defending Gurman months ago when he said that it was planned for the M1 generation. It's not until recently that he lost the plot and burned his best sources. The nerd fever dreams were things like compute modules, GPGPU, third-party graphics cards, slotted RAM, swappable CPUs, all consumed with a heavy dose of hopeium.
I don't claim to be some Svengali with my magic crystal ball. I simply predicted the most boring, staid product that Apple could release as a Mac Pro, and stumbled, staggered, and fell on top of the correct answer. I'm thoroughly enjoying my first place prize of cold pizza and bitterness.
Further an Extreme Mac Pro need not have cost $12k.
That was hyperbole, my friend. It doesn't matter what it might cost because it doesn't exist.
The Mac Pro meanwhile is almost priced to down sell customers to the Studio - a “seriously don’t buy this, no really get the Studio” price.
I think the Mac Pro is suffering from the same fate as the iMac, just worse. The iMac was once the crown jewel of the consumer Mac line. Now, Apple can't be arsed enough to update it with an M2. The Mac Pro was the fabulous bejeweled halo product, now it's the expensive gewgaw that Apple hides in the middle of a presentation, perhaps only updated because Ternus said it was "for another day". They already have the fancy case and Ultra chip, might as well slap it inside and call it a day.
Phil Schiller once said that every product has to justify its existence. Here's how Phil explained the Mac Pro back in 2017:
Mac Pro is actually a small percentage of our CPUs — just a single-digit percent. However, we don’t look at it that way. The way we look at it is that there is an ecosystem here that is related. So there might be a single-digit percentage of pros who use a Mac Pro; there’s that 15 percent base that uses Pro software frequently and 30 percent who use it casually, and these are related. These are not distinct little silos. There’s a connection between all of this.
Courtesy of
Jason Snell at Macworld, back in February of this year. I think Snell put it better than I could:
That’s Schiller explaining that the Mac Pro is valuable because… well, because it’s connected to the people who use Pro software a little and who use Pro software a lot, and… it’s all related, I guess? It sure seems a lot squishier when you think about it.
Phil's word salad from six years ago pretty much shows how difficult it has been for Apple to justify the Mac Pro's existence, which I think is why the quad "Extreme" got axed during M1 development.
But then Apple released a Pro anyway, despite their own belief according to this rumor that the product has no real future and cannot justify its existence against the lower end of the product stack.
I think Apple was still kicking around the idea of perhaps having another go at the quad, back when Ternus made his comment. After Ternus' vague statement, Apple had no choice but to make an Apple Silicon Mac Pro, but it could be the last one. It depends on how many users still need slots for their non-GPU tasks. It's no longer a hotrod race car, but a truck sporting pink flamingo mud flaps.
Apple’s pockets are deep, but they aren’t infinite as evidenced by the fact that even they produce chiplets for their products, eg the Ultra.
Apple's pockets are deep because they don't waste dosh on frivolous vanity projects. As Steve Jobs once said, "real artists ship". They could have engineered the quad, it just didn't make good business sense, which includes not using valuable engineering resources on a handful of niche customers.
And to be frank, they run very lean on engineering staff, which is another possible cause of not being able to produce an Extreme. There are multiple reports of the SOC team after the M1 being happy with their products but thoroughly exhausted getting out multiple new SOC lines with a lack of new people requiring a massive input from existing staff.
That's absolutely true. We've often heard reports of how relatively small Apple's engineering teams are. Quality CPU architects don't grow on trees. Sometimes those invaluable engineers move to other companies, retire, get hit by a bus, or become patent attorneys.
Further, the benefits of the chiplet approach extend beyond cost savings. And while it’s also thoroughly possible that the packaging technology may simply not be ready yet, Apple’s own patents, strings found in Apple device codes, and previous rumors indicated a switch to greater use. This was not just pie in the sky thinking either.
I don't think chiplets are a panacea, I don't place it in the circus side show category. I just don't think they are necessarily the next best thing, particularly when Apple has access to the best nodes and can integrate with impunity. I'm ambivalent about whether they go the multi-die route or not. I trust Johny Srouji to make the right call on that, I just want good products.
The patents may be interesting, but patents ain't products. I'm content with waiting until Apple actually ship a physical product, and leave the arcane wizardry of patent black magic to folks who are much smarter than I am.
That being said, don't tell me this doesn't look like it was made in a clown car:
Regardless, I don't enjoy being a buzzkill. I'm simply not one for wild speculation. I appreciate your eternal optimism,
@dada_dave. I don't know which garden they grow such people as you, but I'm glad that they do. Keep in mind that, here at TechBoards, the week isn't officially over until Colstan has posted his weekly rant about whatever randomly comes to mind.
I wouldn’t put much stock on any planning that is for a product more than 2 years out. Nobody is working on M6 or M7 and, from experience, internal roadmaps are meaningless other than as exercises in forecasting needed man-power and EDA licenses. Once you start working on a chip, at that point the system architecture is locked down. But M5 may be very different than what this source assumes it is, and M7 is not even worth speculating on.
Noted. As always, I appreciate, respect, and defer to your expertise.
Reviewers could only find a handful of cards (and that’s being generous) where it made sense to use the actual internal PCIe connection as opposed to putting the Studio into a chassis or using an external enclosure for a lot less money with otherwise no improvement in performance, heat, or noise.
