Why would someone choose the new Mac Pro over the Mac Studio?

0 votes
by (120 points)
What are the reasons to buy the new Mac Pro when all it has is the same M2 Ultra chip as God’ Cube Mac Studio?

1 Answer

0 votes
by (2.5k points)
The new Mac Pro has been joined by the cheaper Mac Studio. Both features the M2 Ultra chip, but one might be drawn to the pricier Mac Pro for reasons that are evident, including. For example, Mac Pro offers a much bigger chassis to house more cooling equipment for its thermal capabilities. Other advantages of the Mac Pro include more I/O ports and most importantly, the Mac Studio lacks six open PCI expansion slots which the Mac Pro does have. These slots are essential for many users in several professions which depend on specialized hardware such as sound cards, I/O cards, storage cards, networking cards etc.
by (100 points)
As other industry people have stated, the PCIE slots for specialist A/V cards might have been useful when M1 Studio launched but because it wasn’t, a lot of those devices were either replaced with TB3 versions or they got put in a Ext box, so the Mac Pro audience is now even smaller than it would have been.
by (100 points)
For those who didn’t watch throughout, at 5:09 he says it exists just for PCI slots so there ya go
by (100 points)
If I was someone that was waiting eagerly for the Mac Pro to have the M-series chips, I would have been pissed that this is what they released. It's insane that Apple didn't show off any expansion cards, like extra GPU cores or maybe extra Neural Engine cores. You can get the Mac Studio with every single thing maxed out and it would still be less than the starting price of the Pro, and at 1/10 the physical footprint.
by (100 points)
Most content post is on PC, but in the audio post world, Mac is still very much dominant. ProTools is best used with HDX acceleration/IO cards which connect to Avid audio interfaces. HDX uses PCIE.

Thing is that we have been used to using Thunderbolt to PCI-E chassis for a while. And while they are certainly a bit more messy, a lot of studios are used to using them already with Mac Studios/Mac Minis. A plus I also did not consider with the Mac Studio is how much less space they take up on a rack versus a Mac Pro - you can actually get two in a half depth 2U rack.

Even with the added cost of a PCIE chassis (typically $500-ish), it is still much cheaper to go Mac Studio. Of course many will go for the Mac Pro for the added convenience/reliability, but the Mac Studio has proved a surprising hit that may end up eating most of its market share.
by (100 points)
The fact you can get same performance from the computer for half the price is hilarious
by (100 points)
I appreciate your comments on this. However, someone told me that the actions in Mac Pro are done immediately. On the other hand, the same actions in Mac Studio need a little more time. is it true?
by (100 points)
Thanks for pointing out reasons for this machine. Too many people are assuming that their needs are the only ones that exist.
by (100 points)
I don't know why people even consider buying Macs for desktop use, especially when studios require GPU intensive work. The performance of the Titan V, a card released in 2017 (almost 6 years ago), is 14.14% higher than that of the M2 Ultra according to Geekbench's OpenCL compute benchmarks. That's right, a 6 year old card trashes the M2 Ultra by about 15%. Just to be clear, some people use multiple 4090s for their work scores 2.97 times the M2 ultra on the benchmark (3 times the compute power), so that shows how bad the M2 Ultra is. The benefit of Apple Silicon is its ridiculous efficiency, which is why I have an M2 Macbook. The battery life is better than any Windows laptop.

But, I would never every buy a Mac desktop. Desktops are about power and the Mac doesn't cut it. Unless you use desperately need Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, there's no reason to use it. Pros generally use Premiere Pro, After Effects, Pro Tools, Ableton, etc. The two softwares (with many Windows alternatives) themselves can't justify the weak hardware especially if you're big studio that requires a lot of compute. Then there's the reverse of the previous scenario, which is that a lot of pro software isn't available for Mac, which adds to the problem. Apple Silicon Macs can't Bootcamp Windows either since they aren't x86. Nvidia Cuda cores also have a lot of software designed specifically for it too, which can't be emulated on the Mac.

Apple's CPU is ridiculously fast and Geekbench results show that the single core scores of the M2 Ultra are equal to the 13900K and multi-core scores are equal to the more powerful flagship 13900KS (coincidence or by design, who knows). For studio purposes, the multi-core score is more important since tasks are more parallelisable than say, gaming. The M2 Ultra is basically a 13900KS and a GPU in between the 4060 Ti and 4060 combined into one. Such a bad combo. But let me show you how efficient it is. The M2 Ultra has a TDP of 60 watts. The 13900KS has a TDP of 150 Watts. The 4060Ti is 160 Watts and the 4060 is 115 watts. Say a weighted average of about 150 watts for the GPU. The combined TDP is 300 watts. The M2 Ultra doesn't just include the CPU and GPU, but a bunch of other stuff including the RAM, controllers, etc. We'll say a combined total of 30 watts for those extra components for a normal Windows desktop. The M2 Ultra's TDP is 90 watts for the higher 76 core GPU variant since nobody is getting the default one.

That means that Apple is achieving the same compute as its Intel + Nvidia equivalent using 27% of the power, which is insane and matches Apple's own claims of 1/4th the power for the same compute. Insane is an understatement, frankly. But despite how ludicrous this is, nobody cares because desktops are about pure power, whereas phones and laptops are not.
by (100 points)
I think the extra $3000 is basically "just because they could". The market that needs such PCIe slots are so niche that they are willing to pay a premium. If they want to ship a more flexible Mac Pro in the future as well they don't want to lower the price now just to raise it later causing people to say they are "raising the price" of Mac Pro in the future. But yeah in terms of value/price, the current Mac Pro is pretty low.
by (100 points)
Same chip but twice the price The M3 chip will probably be amazing! Great content and dope graphics
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