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The best thing about this whole event is that they didn't mention AI even once, all they're saying is ML. Which is what it is. AI is a hype word.
I agree. I was really impressed that even with regard to the Autocorrect update, they used technical terms like "transformer model" without using hype words. They very clearly labeled it as a predictive text engine rather than some magical pseudo-sentient enigma or something.
ML is subset of AI. AI that is inclusive of other concepts and it's not a buzzword. It's valid to call anything ML as AI. Sure there is a lot of AI hype but it's not some made up marketing jargon.
Why would they mention their weakness? Have you heard of Siri lately? What do they have to offer in the AI space? Nothing. At best they can contribute to ML by hardware. With that said. ML != AI. ML is a means to AI. Google, Facebook can talk about AI. They have Bard, Llama to show off. I'm sure Apple is furiously working behind the scene trying to catch up and if they do, they will be sure to be noisy about it.
Games have talked about "enemy AI" for 25+ years. Hell, Halo 1 was considered revolutionary for its advanced enemy AI. Was that a hype word? Was that an incorrect misnomer?
If it's written in Python, it's probably ML

If it's written in PowerPoint, it's probably AI

They also mentioned transformers a few times, without saying AI.
I don't understand the distinction. Why is it okay to claim that a machine can learn, but not that the result is an artificial form of intelligence?

Most AI systems we're interacting with today don't do any learning. They've been trained, and now they are being used to generate content or classify things, but they aren't doing 'machine learning' any more.

They are being used to do tasks that require intelligence. But they are accomplishing them via artifice.

Like a sort of artificial form of intelligence.

They only mentioned "transformer model" several times and one other type of model for generating our avatar (forgot which type that is).
$7k starting price. High but compared to? Just glancing at the new HP Z6 G5, which may be a fair comparison, with a 16-core CPU, 8x16GB of memory (the lowest configuration that populates all 8 channels of that CPU), minimal storage, and a parts bin GPU that nobody wants, $6k. To get 8 thunderbolt ports like the mac pro you'd have to fill each and every one of its add-in card slots with a HP dual TB4 card.

Edit: The HP 340L1AA TBT4 card is only compatible with one expansion slot in that machine, so what I suggested is not even possible. Perhaps the Mac Pro is the only workstation you can get with 8 Thunderbolt4 ports.

I’d been wondering how they were going to handle expandable memory with the M chip, since the integrated memory seemed pretty central to the design - seems like the answer is, “they’re not.” Be interested to see if PCI expansion is sufficient to satisfy the Max Pro market.
Congrats to Apple on completing another IA migration! It really is an incredible accomplishment to get such a massive base of customers, partners, and developers to run on a new architecture so quickly and relatively seamlessly. I remember the PPC to Intel move, which was also well done, and they'd improved even on that ... with what must be many many more users. Awesome!

P.S. Hopefully this transition frees someone to make a Pro Display with a webcam!

I own an M1 Ultra Mac Studio that I primarily run Asahi Linux on. Prior to that, I ran a trashcan 2013 Mac Pro 6-core Xeon that I primarily ran Ubuntu Linux on. Thus, I buy Apple primarily for the hardware.

After watching today's WWDC product announcements regarding the Mac Studio and Mac Pro updates, I really don't see myself ever buying a Mac Pro in the future. While I can understand how very large studios may value the additional expandability, a massive case with ability for expensive upgrades just isn't something I would need or pay extra money for.

It looks like Apple has targeted the Mac Studio for the largest number of professionals, while reserving the Mac Pro for a niche high-end market - and in these regards, the Mac Pro is a continuation of the 2019 Mac Pro, whereas the Mac Studio is a continuation of the trashcan 2013 Mac Pro.

192GB of memory on the Mac Studio is enough to run Llama 65B in full FP16.

And at 800GB/s bandwidth, it will do so pretty quickly. I think my M1 Pro memory bandwidth is 200GB/s and I was running quantized 13B Alpaca relatively quickly, I'd say useable for a personal chatbot, and I think it was swapping every now and then causing pauses.

So having 4x the memory bandwidth should allow large models to run pretty damn fast. Maybe not H100 GPGPU speeds but enough for people to do some development on.

The best part to me is that this looks like a "platform" that can be updated year over year. They can just keep putting the updated M-whatever chip in it (and hopefully eventually figure out how to quadruple it vs. just having the Ultra). Ideally they can bump it up to PCIe 5 and Thunderbolt 5 "easily" too. In other words, the fact that this is so similar to the Mac Studio means it hopefully won't suffer the same fate as the previous "one-hit wonder" Mac Pros. An M3 (3nm) Mac Pro with PCIe5 and Thunderbolt 5 would be a very good machine I think.
I’ve been draggggggiiinnngggg my feet on a new desktop workstation. Waiting for the store to come back to truly make a decision but I think that I’m gonna go for a Studio. The hacker in me wants to build a beefy Linux workstation but the pragmatist in me wants a machine that just works. I think the Apple tax is worth it here.
Well there was 3 interesting questions about the apple silicon mac pro going into the keynote:

- how will they provide more RAM than the Mac Studio?

- how will they provide more GPU than the Mac Studio?

- how will they provide more CPU than the Mac Studio?

And the answer is « let’s not! »

I’m disappointed there was no surprise on that front.

I’m sad they mentioned gaming and created a « gaming mode » and then the Mac Pro has no GPU story to speak of. So all the 3d artists will keep stacking green team or red team GPU in their intel or amd boxes. This is not a good sign for 3d authoring software.

I think this new Mac Pro is more geared for PCIe developers so they can start testing drivers etc and the big launch will be with the M3.

It really doesn't offer any huge benefits over the Mac Studio.

Incoming: “Not going to upgrade, I’m fine with my 1996 toaster, thank you!”

It’d be actually interesting to read from people who buy a top config and how they use it.

It's a little interesting that that are going to the Video 1st/ Training second model and abandoning the HPC market where they can't compete with high, multi TB workstations.

But I guess it's playing to the strength that video decode/encode has right now with the M series chips.

I wish that they would have a tiered memory expansion, eg 192gb fast tier, and expandable to 1.5TB slower but DDR5 expandable.

Mac Pro and Mac Studio, spec'd to the same maximum possible Ultra cpu, 192GB ram, 1tb ssd, Mac Pro is $9600, while the Mac Studio is $6600. How many people really need the Mac Pro's PCI-E expandability (which probably no third party GPU's can use) to justify the $3000 premium, in an arguably worse form factor?
Anyone else look at the motherboard & think, wow, heck yeah? It was barren. Flat, hugely unpopulated, painted black.

Seeing such a stark & severely empty slab of pcb is something I've been looking forward to. With more and more on chip, we don't need all this extra componentry all over our systems.

PCB might well be cheaper than cables.. but I can perhaps envision MCIO (Mini Cool-Edge IO)/SFF-TA-1002 taking over some day, disaggregating peripheral cards off the motherboard.

Kinda unimpressive since it seems that it's just mac studio with pci-e expansion
Given that the Mac Pro = Mac Studio + Expansion Slots

It seems clear that Apple never wanted to launch the Intel Mac Pro (cheese grater), but they saw a timing gap between the trash-can Mac Pro and the Mac Studio that needed to be filled.

With fairly good support for Apple Silicon, the $4K Mac Studio might be a reasonable choice for a home deep learning rig. 64G of shared memory for the GPUs/neural units, and CPUs sounds good.
As a developer I'd be terrified if Apple was showing my app in one of these events.
I guess I've never been blessed enough to work at a place that will spend $7k on a base model edit station.
Would the Mac Pro help me at all for my computing needs? I write code all day and have several IDEs and DataGrip running, use Docker, etc. I currently use an MBP with the Apple Chip. Would a beefier machine actually do anything for me, in the form of faster compilation or anything...or nah?
Does anybody have the specs on the M2 Ultra chip? Looks like it supports up to 192GB of unified RAM, which is twice the 96GB of the M2 Max, so is this just 4 silicon dies jammed up against each other? (Apple website hasn't been updated yet with this info, but I'm very curious!)

Edit: Ah, looks like they made a separate press release with that info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36199637

The fact Apple didn't announce that their product line was 'now fully ARMed' during today's WWDC keynote was a lost opportunity.
The Mac Pro link in this page shows the Intel Xeon-based system. I was very confused
The wild thing about that 192GB of memory: it's all potentially VRAM.
Two questions I'm interested in:

1) Are these machines still limited to running a maximum of two macOS VMs?

2) Can they drive more than a single 8k display?

Interesting, only single CPU. I was thinking, that for Mac Pro they will go somehow with multiple processors and some magic with shared memory access solved in OS. Interesting though, how the external GPU support will look like if you have PCI and if it will be expanded to the TB4 as well.
I didn’t see a reason to upgrade and I feel I am their audience here, I own the last one.
Specs look cool but I haven't bought into apple silicon because I will probably always need to do debugging of x86/64 binaries.

The one workload that would make consider apple silicon is hashcat and password cracking. I am sure that's much faster compared to intel but what is the comparison between the latest nvidia 4090 vs mac studio? I don't know how the unified memory affects gpu workloads, but I do know a lot if graphics people only use macs. If I have to buy a bunch if 4090's anyways, macs don't make sense unless I am a millionaire and this was a hobby.

In this discussion: people who know little about Apple Silicon architecture ("no discreet GPU, not buying"), who are not the target audience for this ("$77k for a comoputer!?!?!"), who do have no idea what video creatives need (see: discreet GPU), raging.

These systems (especially the Pro) are for people who spend all day working on 4k and up video.

Also, guys: do you really think that any of you are smarter than Apple? That Apple doesn't spend a lot of time talking to top creative professionals?

These systems aren't developed in a vacuum, especially at these price points.

They're just ridiculous with Mac Pro pricing. $3k for pretty chassis and $3.5k for chassis with wheels. It's a joke. They didn't even match specs for previous Intel Mac Pro, when it comes to RAM.

IMO this announcement is just a funeral for this product.

Mac Studio is fine, I guess... I hate small computers so I would prefer huge empty box with lots of air inside which is likely to be silent. But not with this overprice.

>Today, Apple is carbon neutral for global corporate operations and is focused on its Apple 2030 goal to make every product carbon neutral. This means every Mac Apple creates, from design to manufacturing to customer use, will have net-zero climate impact.

I love my bullshit green washing of hunks of metal produced by the millions too. Buying carbon credits from I-Promise-I-Will-Plant-Trees Inc. is still lying, Apple.

Only 24 cpu cores? Doesn't that seem skimpy when compared to say, a threadripper or sapphire rapids xeon?
For all the accolades about the Apple cpus, market share remains within historical ranges (5-10% per my recollection going back to the late 80s).

For Q1 per IDC: The top five PC manufacturers by market share were Lenovo (23.9%), HP (21.5%), Dell (16.0%), Apple (7.5%), and Acer (6.4%).

Glad the Studio is sticking around.

For many tasks the M1 Max base Mac Studio became an incredible value.

For other than 3d Rendering, the performance bump isn't that huge between M1 Max and M2 Max from the graphic on Apple's screen.

Feels like a missed opportunity they didn’t design the Mac Studio part of the Mac Pro as a replaceable module you could upgrade every other year. Or buy the non-Studio part to upgrade your Mac Studio.
The M1 Mac Studio has just disappeared from the Apple website. Maybe this disappearance could indicate how great of a deal it would have been if it had remained on sale at a lower price.
I wouldn't buy a $7000 computer without a discrete GPU.
I’m confused, where are the Afterburner expansion cards when you go configure a new MacPro?

It’s missing and is basically an overpriced MacStudio without them.

Why didn’t they release GPUs for those PCIe slots? I just don’t get why they couldn’t do a simple thing instead of AR/VR.
Will the 192 GiB of RAM be properly addressable by all GPU for AI stuff or are there some NUMA-style constraints?