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What is the point of the MacPro? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I fail to see the purpose of a MacPro over a Mac Studio.

I know it has pci slots, but can someone tell me how they will realistically be used? Used in a way that can't be done with thunderbolt.

The pricing seems absurd compared to a Mac Studio.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I was wondering about this.

The most well-known use-case of the Mac Pro is in video editing. Famously, Pixar use Macs Pro to render their movies, so being able to install GPUs is essential. The MP23 doesn't support extra GPUs, either via PCIE or Thunderbolt, so what exactly is the point?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Let’s just say you had a bunch of Audio and video capture card that are pcie. If you wanted to use thunderbolt you’d end up buying multiple pcie to thunderbolt enclosures, have to deal with thunderbolt cables, power cables for the enclosure, and making sure it all is reliable. If you had 3-4 cards that could end up being a mess of wires.

Mac Pro isn’t really targeting normal consumers. It’s a high end product for media professionals. Big companies have budgets for this stuff and professional workstations are expensive regardless of brand.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wonder if there is really not a need for a MacPro at this point, but if they scrapped it, people might thing the ARM chips are not up to the challenge of being a workstation.

I bet we will see it slowly phased out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Being generous, it's possible that to be able to use the PCIE cards that are compatible with macOS over Thunderbolt, it would end up being more expensive to use a Studio. But yeah, given that Studio and Pro are benchmarking at pretty much the same, it seems like a no-brainer to go with the Studio.