You may have read our article “The New Mac Pro 2023 - In Name Only”, we asked an owner of a current Mac Pro and the target buyer for the new Mac Pro to explain his feelings.

James Richmond is a 2019 Mac Pro owner and is precisely the kind of person who should be excited about the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro. But he isn’t. In this article James explains why.

Apple have announced the new Mac Pro alongside an updated Mac Studio. What they announced wasn’t hugely surprising but nor was it entirely pleasing. I’d like to talk a bit about why I think this.

The 2019 Mac Pro

A bit of background here. I was an early adopter of the 2019 Mac Pro which was my main machine in the studio until about 6 months ago. It is a well specced machine, it has a 3.2Ghz 16 core processor, 4TB SSD and I specced it intially out with 48GB of RAM that I upgraded to 128GB and then to 256GB.

In the last few years I have started doing more and more video work and I initially specced this machine out with a base Radeon Pro W580X graphics card but have since upgraded to a Radeon Pro W5700X.

I used this with an Avid HDX based Pro Tools system, as well as a Rednet PCIER card for native and a load of PCIE NVME cards including a Highpoint SSD7505 hardware RAID card to access transfer speeds in excess of what the Mac Pro’s PCIE Gen 3.0 architecture would natively allow for a single drive.

The Mac Pro Is No Longer My Main Studio Machine

If the Mac Pro is no longer my main system then what do I currently use?

It is a Mac Studio M1 Ultra, 20-core CPU, 48-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine- which has 128GB RAM, 4TB of internal storage and like the Mac Pro sits in the machine room next door to me. I am using two expansion chassis with the Mac Studio as I need more than three slots. Both machines are in daily use here.

The Mac Pro, because it can take a huge amount of RAM, is designated as a VSL server, which serves up primarily orchestral libraries to the Studio. They are both attached to TB3 docks in the control room via Corning optical thunderbolt cables and I switch between them using a very clever 4 port dual monitor KVM that allows me to switch between them using the mouse by double clicking the wheel and then using left or right mouse buttons to go up or down in sequence. I also have a couple of PCs on the KVM too.

In terms of cost, the Mac Pro was about £9k to buy in 2019 before I added storage RAM and the extra video card which was about £4k more. The Mac Studio cost £5k and then another £1500 for expansion chassis and about £2k in storage. These are expensive machines.

Convergence Of Hardware Between Mac Pro And Mac Studio

The new Macs have been announced by Apple and the Studio and the Mac Pro have the same processor, RAM and graphics capability, which is an interesting move by Apple. 

In one sense it acknowledges that a smaller computer doesn’t have to be less powerful in 2023. If I was in the market for a new Studio and had no need for a tower then I’d be really unhappy if Apple made a faster version just for the Mac Pro just to create a false category separator in order to get a bit more money from someone who just wants the fastest machine possible.

So that is good. Well done Apple.The question though now is… who is a Mac Pro really for now? Well, it used to be me. And it still is. But… just not this one.

Apple had a real problem with the Mac Pro design as they shifted from Intel to Silicon. The requirement of SoC that the CPU and RAM be so closely integrated meant that they had to choose between keeping the upgradeability of the Mac Pro and therefore not using SoC (resulting in a slower machine), or using SoC which meant they had to produce a machine that had to have its RAM and graphics specced at the point of puchase and then that is it. You cannot upgrade it, you need to buy a new machine.

Apple’s hardware engineering chief, John Termus, commented on the lack of graphics expansion in interview with Daring Fireball’s John Gruber:

”Fundamentally, we've built our architecture around this shared memory model and that optimization, and so it's not entirely clear to me how you'd bring in another GPU and do so in a way that is optimized for our systems… It hasn't been a direction that we wanted to pursue."

I didn’t expect Apple to do anything other than the latter here. They have been, over a number of years, reducing the expandability of their machines across the board. 

Expandability

The 2019 Mac Pro was a slight return to the old way of doing things but you still couldn’t internally expand the onboard storage. By this I mean the proprietary modules in that machine. You could still expand it with PCIE NVME or using the Promise HDD cage and some other 3rd party options.

I’ve always had a bias towards the Mac Pro, or any tower computer, as a studio computer for its expandability and just so everything is in one box. I want HDX cards, internal storage, graphics and RAM in one place.I like that. It is also neater when it comes to cabling.

Currently with the Studio I have so much cabling to deal with using two expansion chassis, HDX, external audio interfacing and it is just annoying. Thunderbolt 3 is also not as fast as PCIE when it comes to moving around lots of data and I do that a lot. This new Mac Pro is a bit neither fish nor fowl.

Is The New Mac Pro Really A Mac Pro?

It has the look of a Mac Pro but it sort of.. isn’t one, at least for the reasons that most audio professionals would need one. Most audio professionals simply don’t need the huge graphics capability of the new machines, but if you need a Mac Pro for its slots then you are paying for it regardless. This was the advantage of the previous Mac Pros. You could configure what you need, not for things you don’t need, and the price would adjust accordingly. You could expand it post purchase too.

You are unable to expand the RAM or the graphics post purchase and whilst you can upgrade the storage to 8TB you have to use Apple’s own storage which negates the reason for wanting to do it, which is to avoid paying inflated Apple prices for storage. It replaces the storage you specced at purchase, rather than adding to it.  This all isn’t very Pro to my mind.

I am a prime candidate for a new Mac Pro. I want a fast machine that has a few PCIE slots, currently I am using 4 slots in my Mac Pro and my Studio each, and a shedload of onboard storage. This also speaks to something that has happened in the last few years, which is a lot of the stuff that used to be internal to the Mac can now be outside it. But it isn’t ideal that all of it is outside.

For instance, my Mac Pro has a Focusrite Rednet PCIER card in it for 128 channels of Dante. That card doesn’t work with Apple Silicon so I now use an AX64 from Digital Audio Denmark which does 256 channels of native audio over Thunderbolt 3.

The Importance Of Storage

The issue is storage. Most of my PCIE slots are actually used for storage drives. I have about 16TB in each computer and they sit on PCIE cards. In the Mac Pro they are internal to the machine. 

In the Studio they are external on PCIE cards in an expansion chassis. It doesn’t have to be like that though. There is no reason at all that Apple couldn’t simply make room on a logic board for those drives, like all modern PC motherboards do. 

Some PC motherboards have 5 NVME slots on them.

Adding a drive to a PC motherboard with an avilable slot can take under five minutes. One of my PC’s even has them on the rear of the motherboard so I don’t need to take out the graphics card to get access. Those motherboards cost usually around £500 or less. Why can’t Apple simply do that?

The answer: they don’t want to. Audio and Video professionals need a lot of storage. Apple know this. Why do they not cater for it beyond the old way of doing it- which is either via PCIE slots, or requiring them to have them hang off the slower Thunderbolt 3 bus?

What I want is a machine that can accept NVME drives, and can fit a HDX card or two, maybe a video capture card, although given an increasing number of cameras (like the Lumix S5IIx that I use) now support streaming to a computer, so that isn’t as necessary as it was either.

Does The Old ‘Pro’ Form Factor Fit the New SOC Approach?

It seems that Apple has made a couple of mistakes here. Firstly with the move to make almost all of its machines unserviceable and non-upgradeable but to keep the Mac Pro in an old form factor that doesn’t take into account how people actually want to use it. 

Most people who need a Mac Pro don’t need a huge number of PCIE slots. They usually need a few. People need onboard storage and they might have a couple of products such as HDX cards that have no workaround for other than an expansion chassis.

The previous version of Avid DSP was Pro Tools HD. You could have a huge number of Accel cards added to the core card. With HDX you can only have three. Yes, there was a demo of the 2019 Mac Pro using six but it isn’t supported officially and now the argument for it has largely gone away with the Hybrid Engine. The main reason for having more than one HDX card is down to needing more than 64 channels of IO, a limitation of a single HDX card.

Another issue for me is the ‘modular’ nature of the Mac Pro. Apple used this as a selling point for the 2019 Mac Pro. To use that word is stretching the definition (and the friendship) somewhat. To my mind a modular Mac Pro would be one where you keep the chassis and every time a new model comes out you upgrade the logic board/motherboard assembly. 

Believe it or not this is actually possible. Framework sell modular laptops with the idea being that when you upgrade its motherboard you can buy a $39 Coolermaster case for the old one and reuse it with the obvious use being as a small media server. Genius idea! But let’s get real here, the chances of Apple adopting this approach is either very close to, or actually zero but that doesn’t stop it being brilliant. Or desirable. 

My 2019 Mac Pro is worth less than half what I paid for it. I accept that.  I don’t like it but that is what happens with technology. Imagine if I could upgrade it to the latest specification and reuse the old board in a cheaper chassis. We also know the Apple silicon machines run a lot cooler so you wouldn’t need a huge case with enormous fans in them either.

I also accept that the move to SoC means that a new Mac Pro will never be as upgradeable as they once were but the form factor needs to evolve more than it has for it to be viable, especially given the cost. If I was in the market right now for a new studio computer it wouldn’t be the new Mac Pro. It would certainly be the Studio but that isn’t an ideal machine either. It is not internally expandable and I would still need two expansion chassis for storage and my HDX card and there is the speed limitation for file transfers over Thunderbolt 3.

What Would I Like To See Apple Do For Professionals?

In my opinion if Apple want to really make a machine that appeals to professionals then it isn’t the new Mac Pro and whilst the Studio might suit a lot of people, it doesn’t suit everyone and I include myself in that. The Studio just has the fewest downsides, partly because it is cheaper. What I want to see is a machine that has a few slots (let’s say three), a shedload of internal PCIE 4.0 NVME expansion and a smaller case. It could be half the size of the Mac Pro. Hopefully it would be cheaper than one too.

If this machine was available today I would sell both the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio and buy it. But it is not, so I won’t, nor will I be buying anything else for now. I am waiting to see what Apple do with the M3, assuming that is what it will be called. The proposed move to 3nm manufacturing has the potential to see an even bigger performance increase. I just hope that when they do they look at what professionals actually need now and in the immediate future when designing these machines.

Would you buy a new Mac Pro? If not, what changes would change your mind?