8TB SSD and Radeon Pro W5700X Upgrade Options Coming to Mac Pro

Cue the comments from the 90% of people here who were never gonna buy it anyway.

Great, now make a consumer version please. Some people do not need a $3000 CPU but would like upgradability. Pretty please?

Crossposted:

Everyone seems to be forgetting the mantra of buying a mac tower: Upgrade it yourself.

The CPU, GPU, Storage and Ram are all upgradable. buying the machine is smart. Paying apple to install stuff is NOT. You're going to use this machine for the next 15 years.

As a long time Mac Pro customer, this product is disappointing and Apple's direction saddening. Most pros like myself, who work in print design and photography, no longer have viable options with Apple. My previous Mac Pro cost me around $3,500, or just over half what a new Mac Pro will cost. Some will say that the iMac or iMac Pro is more than I need. Could be. But I want to pick my own monitor. I want two TB3 busses. I want expandability with slots. MacBook Pro 16" does not offer the performance required to use as a desktop substitute. Pros like me used to have that before, now Apple wants us to pay double or more for expandability.

Sorry, Apple, but I think you've finally lost your collective minds.

How much you wanna bet this "Pro" "Upgradable" machine is going to have some stupid BS proprietary connector on their storage so you have to pay 3x as much to buy it from Apple? You know. Because #Security. ...Or something. ??

on the contrary, you're paying high on the base price for the flexibility. Look, their process was simple. They went to pros and asked what they wanted. They wanted a bare bones machine with upgrade paths out the wazoo. Apple went back to their bean counters and asked a simple question: How much money do we have to charge for the base configuration to make up for the fact that no one is going to max it out from us.

The only people maxing this out are showy rich people who don't know what they're doing. That's why they CLEARLY asked the press to advertise how expensive it was.

They're going to make tons of money off of rich boomers who walk into the apple store and buy "the one that's good for making videos." Meanwhile other people are going to upgrade it themselves.

Here’s the issue with a lower price Mac tower, using a Core i5/i7/i9...Apple simply doesn’t want to push everything through the PCH and that’s what would be required.

Using the iMac as the example...the Core i9-9900K CPU in mine has x16 lanes of PCIe 3.0, all of which are dedicated to the GPU,a Radeon Pro Vega 48, to have the optimal GPU performance. This exhausts the PCIe lanes of the CPU and in a typical PC tower, you have either one x16 slot and one at x0 or you can support 2 GPUs at x8/x8 By splitting the bandwidth. Everyone here knows this, right?

Any remaining PCIe slots in a PC (or mythical Mac) tower are routed through the PCH (Intel Z300-Series for 9th Gen CPU-based PCs) which has a total of x24 lanes of PCIe 3.0, which are allocated to the vacant PCIe slots on the motherboard, typically in and x4/x1/x1 scenario with an extra x4 m.2 slot, maybe more, somewhere on the motherboard.

But Apple made that decision for you by integrating a single Titan Ridge controller for a pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports and installing their proprietary slot flash storage in place of leaving a m.2 slot open for the end user.

But what I’m hearing is that a lot of users on this forum want those slots, preferably x4/x4 AND the super fast storage and the Thunderbolt 3 ports, which is where Apple says...nope. Simply, nope. Because they’ve seen what happens when you try to push super fast SSD and I/O AND a couple of PCIe x4 cards (10GbE and another m.2 carrier card) through the PCH, only to have it slow down to a crawl trying to shove all that data through Intel’s puny, pathetic and tiny DMI 3.0 bus to the CPU. Something they have been doing since the inception of the Core i-Series.

This alone, should be enough for users to understand why Apple will never build a Core i-Series based tower. The engineers, like them or not, are paid to make the best decisions in the interest of Apple and of you, the users, which is not to try and crush every ounce of data through DMI from the PCH to the CPU and watch performance go in the sh!tcan as unsuspecting users try to cram more spinning rust SATA storage and 4 cheap-o PCIe SSDs on a single carrier board through a inadequate pipe. It‘s not what the engineers are paid to do, it makes Apple look bad (PC vendors don’t care, they are simply pushing tin), and it hurts customer trust. So, they went with the iMac and the Mac mini on the mid- and low-end and then moved to Xeon on the high-end where Intel deigned to put in x64 lanes of PCIe 3.0 on the CPU die itself.

As for the other parts, they would be common amongst the iMac and a mythical Slotbox Mac (GbE, USB 3, 802.11AC, BT 4.2/5.0 and DRAM is usually 2 or 4 slots, with support up to 64GB or now 128GB of DRAM.

So, basically, the only real objections to an iMac is that Apple chose your display and GPU for you (not some sh!tty Acer 24” from Costco) and made the storage proprietary (again, not some cheap Adata NVMe crap on special at New Egg) and took away a couple of slots that weren’t going to perform well anyways, because, if you really needed them to perform well, you wouldn’t be buying a Core i-Series PC, right?

I’m pretty much left with the answer that rings true once you get to the heart of the matter. You want to pay Apple the least amount of money you possibly can for the privilege of using macOS and getting free updates every year while tarting it up with cheap components and then demanding help from Apple Support if it falls down and goes boom because you put cheap crap in it.

And please spare me the arguments about customer choice, they didn’t work on Tim Cook, because he isn’t leaving money on the table (’cause it’s his job NOT to leave money on the table), it’s about getting what you want as cheap as possible and it’s on Apple to figure out how to stay profitable, am I right?

Hopefully, Acer, Dell, HP and Lenovo will learn this lesson in the next few years and start jacking up the prices on PCs so that they can stay in business and restricting the crap components that they put into their builds, because that’s what I keep hearing from the so-called Windows PCMR people is the reason that we’re having Windows issues. It would behoove the Top 4 PC OEMs to rethink the race to the bottom and start building themselves a sustainable business instead. Anyone who doesn’t like them doing that would be better off building their own rig anyways, or at least that’s what I keep hearing bellowed around these forums.

So go do it. Otherwise, I’ll trust that Apple knows what they’re doing, even if I don’t always like it or don’t always want to pay for it. Meanwhile, Apple isn’t going to give you what you want, because they figured it out years, even decades ago, after nearly going belly up trying to compete in the shark-infested waters of the PC that staying alive means swimming against the current.

Thus “consumer version”. The CPU accounts for more an 50% of the base model cost. Apple could, in theory, drop in a consumer grade CPU (i7 or i9) and drop the base model price by $2000.

What on earth are you talking about? The CPU in the base model Mac Pro (a W-3223) has a tray price of $750.

If you want to replace that with say an i9-9900KF (top of the line 9th gen i9 without an iGPU, because you don't need it) - the tray price is... $499.

So you've so far shaved off $250 from the build price.

I know it is a different socket but same case, power supply, connectors, and largely same logic board components.

Again, comparing the base W-3223 to the i9-9900KF, you're missing:

750GB of RAM capacity,
4 ram channels
48 lanes of PCIe

There is no way in hell you're using anything close to the same board, or able to provide anywhere close to the same I/O.

more potential interest by third parties to support Apple's double-wide PCI-e connection... which as it stands, will probably never see any additional cards made for it.

(a) I would be dubious if MPX modules would even be used in a "consumer" model. It probably doesn't have enough PCIe lanes to spare.

(b) There was literally a third party MPX module in the Apple Store to buy at launch time, on day 1 - adding frickin mechanical hard drives of all things. There is zero chance no other vendors ship MPX modules.
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Mac mini has soldered ram

No, it doesn't.

zero upgradeability

The CPU and SSD are soldered. But that doesn't mean zero upgradability. Literally just like a laptop, or an iMac: you can add more storage, PCIe cards (including GPUs) and all number of I/O products using TB3 and/or USB ports.

Does it have the same upgradability as the Mac Pro? No of course not, that's literally what you're paying for in the Mac Pro: the ability to upgrade up the ****ing wazoo, internally.

As a long time Mac Pro customer, this product is disappointing and Apple's direction saddening. Most pros like myself, who work in print design and photography, no longer have viable options with Apple. My previous Mac Pro cost me around $3,500, or just over half what a new Mac Pro will cost. Some will say that the iMac or iMac Pro is more than I need.

They would likely be correct. What is your current configuration? I would guess that a Mac Mini would also likely serve you just as well. What software do you run? What is your actual workflow?

Could be. But I want to pick my own monitor.

Then get a Mac Mini.

I want two TB3 busses.

Again, a Mac Mini has two busses, and has a 10Gb/s Ethernet port as an option.

I want expandability with slots.

For what? What cards do you have in your current machine?

MacBook Pro 16" does not offer the performance required to use as a desktop substitute. Pros like me used to have that before, now Apple wants us to pay double or more for expandability.

Again, unless you can give specific examples of what you need that one of these other machines does not provide, it is impossible to respond meaningfully.

Sorry, Apple, but I think you've finally lost your collective minds.

Before I switched to a Mac Mini for most of my personal use, I had a maxed out Mac Pro, with 4 SATA drives, 64GB of RAM and 2 30” Apple Cinema Displays. In various of the Mac Pros I have owned, I had 10Gb/s Ethernet cards, and a few times Fibre channel cards. Today, I have Mac Mini with 64GB of RAM, 2 LG Ultra Wide Thunderbolt Displays, and 4 2TB NVMe SSDs in a RAID 0 config for speed (all the data is backed up to my local server) in an OWC 4m2 external storage configuration.

It is a less expensive machine, runs more quietly, cooler and draws less power. I am happy to be convinced that you have a workflow that this machine does not support, but I need some specifics.

The whole point of the Mac Pro is it's not for the "consumers."

Thus “consumer version”. The CPU accounts for more an 50% of the base model cost. Apple could, in theory, drop in a consumer grade CPU (i7 or i9) and drop the base model price by $2000.

Wheels for the stainless steel frame, $400. Not as pricey as I thought they'd be.