During WWDC 2023, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber spoke with several Apple executives, including software engineering chief Craig Federighi and marketing chief Greg Joswiak. However, the discussion eventually led to an intriguing piece of information about the Mac Pro 2023. According to MacRumors, John Ternus, hardware engineering chief at Apple, mentioned that the company had no plans to support external GPUs or video cards on their latest device.
Ternus explained that Apple designed its architecture around a shared memory model and optimization. Therefore, incorporating another GPU in such a way that it’s optimized for Apple’s system is not entirely clear. This decision is undoubtedly a disappointment to those who wished to use Nvidia cards and CUDA for machine learning training. This move also appears to indicate that Apple may gradually shift the Mac Pro towards planned obsolescence, much like its previous dedicated server range, Xserve.
While Apple has proudly sacrificed the $2,000 accelerator card by building performances equivalent to that of seven Afterburner cards on the Mac Pro, it’s unclear why users would pay $14,000 for hardware that can be done by a $3,999 workstation. However, it’s worth noting that the Mac Studio is likely to be one of the best workstations available.
One of the other restrictions of the Mac Pro is the maximum amount of shared, non-upgradable memory, which is 192GB. This limitation is much less compared to the 1.5TB offered by the previous generation of Mac Pro. However, when asked about it, popular Mac software developer Affinity mentioned that it wouldn’t be an issue for their creative tools applications.
Apple is catering to a broad audience, and its hardware platform is moving away from traditional desktop PC setups. Integrated, mobile-first computing seems to be their motto, and even modularity seems to be replaced. Apple combines everything with ownership of the software stack and offers unmatched value in terms of performance and deployment.
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Alex Smith is a writer and editor with over 10 years of experience. He has written extensively on a variety of topics, including technology, business, and personal finance. His work has been published in a number of magazines and newspapers, and he is also the author of two books. Alex is passionate about helping people learn and grow, and he believes that writing is a powerful tool for communication and understanding.
