Apple is unlikely to have any interest in competing in the high-end workstation or certainly gaming GPU markets when they can just pop in an AMD GPU and walk away.
The Mac Pro in particular needs to have upgradable RAM too, so it’s got to be an entirely different revision, probably with DDR5.
I have a hard believing Apple will ever use a 3rd party GPU. A big reason they went to Apple Silicon was to control the whole stack.
Heck, even my M1 Air gets decent frame rates in WoW maxed out.
If they want to compete against AMD, they would need a tremendous investment in custom hardware for a very small market. That’s unlikely.
For consumer-grade machines I think you’re right. But when you talk about the Mac Pro, you’re talking about a very small niche market of people who require tremendous GPU power for the stuff they do. As stusser mentions, it seems like it’d be a massive waste of effort to come up with an Apple Silicon solution that competes with the highest-end, multi-card GPU setups for an audience that might number in the low tens of thousands.
Right. Apple doesn’t care about core gaming at all, which is stupid because they make a tremendous amount of moolah from casual gaming, but they clearly don’t.
They do care about pro users, I guess because it’s prestigious or whatever, and competing with AMD building custom GPU silicon makes no sense for such a small number of users.
Time for a new MBP finally. My 2017 is long in the tooth, but I did just replace the entire display so it’s going to become a hand-me-down.
I gave the MacPro some thought last night. I think the base config will be all Apple Silicon, but there could be a BTO that supports AMD MPX modules.
I still think they will shoot for an all-Apple Silicon solution. The Mac Pro audience is so small to begin with, and I think they will want to show off how their SOCs perform against other options.
I would be very surprised if they do that, but I guess we’ll see soon enough.
Soon is relative. I think the Mac Pro is likely a WWDC annoucement.
Yes, it’s got to be at least 16 fast cores on the CPU, and have a bridge to external RAM and PCI-express too. My guess is DDR5 so looking at 2022.
I think we’ll see 27” iMac and iMac Pro (or maybe effectively the same thing with just one name, like how there’s a good and better version of iMac.) No Mac Pro yet. I think they’ll miss their two year date to completely refresh their Macs and do Mac Pro next summer.
Also expecting that laptop…and maybe an AirPods refresh.
Work has enough money set aside for my next MBP, that’s been waiting all year, so I’m hoping we get something really good.
There has always been a low-, mid-, and high-end 27" iMac so that’s not a bad bet. Maybe the low end will ship with the M1 and the mid and high will ship with the M1X, but I definitely think the iMac Pro brand is dead.
I think you mean 30”. :-)
So I’ve never ordered a new MBP on launch day. I assume initially you need to use one of the stock configurations if you want it in a reasonable timeframe?
I’ve ordered custom variants on launch day before. They take a little longer (like days) than off-the-shelf, yes, but it’s worth it if you want that configuration. Otherwise you’ll be waiting weeks or months for the initial queue and stock shortages to clear.
So, here are my predictions for Monday.
The only thing I’m really interested in is if Monterey will let you use an old iMac effectually almost as an external monitor with a new Mac Mini. I don’t want to drop $2k just to have a nice photo editing monitor when I already have one.
Same network Screen sharing is close but the added latency just makes it pretty substandard feeling, like running software through Remote Desktop to some server in Latvia.
I’ve been holding off on new air pods waiting for a new release. It’s a shame there’s no real way to fix battery issues, but otherwise they are great for the millions of zoom calls I need to be on.
I thought that was impossible for technical reasons?
Supposedly AirPlay deluxe version (whatever it’s now called) will work almost as well as target display mode? At least that’s the uninformed hope.
If not I’ll probably end up getting an refurbished 2021 iMac when I catch one in the online store.