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I spent $8K on the M2 Ultra Mac Pro even though it’s DUMB



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Apple finally launched a new Mac Pro with Apple Silicon, completing the transition that began 3 years ago at WWDC 2020. The new Mac Pro is faster in its $7,000 base model than the previous $50,000 fully specced model, yet I still think it’s a fundamentally flawed, and unnecessary product. The new Mac Pro misses the mark significantly, and in my opinion kills the Mac Pro category entirely. I get that it’s ‘not for me’ but Apple seems to have made a product that’s not for… anyone? Let’s see how the new Mac Pro vs Mac Studio compares and test out that M2 Ultra chip!

time stamps:
0:00 This is so weird
0:59 Wonderful unboxing
2:18 Internals are nice but silly
4:52 Performance test
6:02 Thermals vs Mac Studio…
7:22 Strange performance results
8:40 M2 Mac Pro is fundamentally bad
9:35 The old Mac Pro was better
11:48 2019 Mac Pro had terrible timing

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#mac #apple #m2 #macpro

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36 Comments

  1. For people dependent on PCI cards like Pro Tools users, the Mac Pro is the only option, unless they want to fork out big bucks for all new audio I/O hardware.

  2. $8,000, and in a year and a half, put it in the closet as everything starts getting slow, won't let you upgrade anything and a brand new $10,000 computer will be waiting for you…. Beautiful design, That's all you get… After 20 years, leaving my hard working dollars at Apple, I'm DONE!!!!!!

  3. I think you should find the cards that go in those slots and tell us why one would use them and for what. Find the experts the Mac Pro is built for.

    Otherwise, the Mac Studio IS the Mac Pro.

  4. those 3dmark wildlife scores may be good, but they pale in comparison to some of the PC scores and so a suitably equipped hackintosh will simply wipe the floor with it. (I have no axe to grind, a have an M1 mac mini, a 2012 mac mini (as a file server), an old 2015 macbook pro and a PC based hackintosh in my workshop.))

  5. I think it’s great. I actually bought a Mac Studio m1 ultra refurb. Because it’s really quite in the same league as the m2 ultra which itself is pretty much the same as as a Mac Pro. At ,ong last I bought a high end Mac, no compromises at a low cost. Oh snap did I just call a $3300 computer low cost? Ah crap, they got me,

  6. is there any compatibility difference between pcie cards in this thing and pcie cards in a thunderbolt enclosure? anything that works in one that doesn't work in the other?

  7. SanDisk do a nice big, quality RAID with SSD disks for about 5k. If you added that to your Studio then you're at the price of a Mac Pro M2. But you only have about four slots. Meanwhile Sonnet and OWC do cheap cards you can put what you want it. Also decklink cards are a thing if you're not into pro audio.

  8. $1,000 for a 2TB storage module is literally insane, borderline robbery.
    Yeah it's 2.5" form factor, but for that price you can get 7TB enterprise NVME drives from Kioxia and Samsung that has same or better throughput and certainly higher endurance. But there's tons of room in the mac pro for 2.5" drives. I mean even a 990 PRO 2TB is only ~$160 which includes controller and DRAM. Apple's is just the NAND chips and board. That's wild.

    Looks like there's a couple SATA ports, even SATA SSDs can keep up with most demands. 8k video and higher might slow down a bit. For just over $1000, slap a couple of 4TB Ironwolf SSD's in there for bulk storage and video editing. You could use external thunderbolt I suppose but it's nice having something built in.

  9. Soo from the beginning, I’m from Portugal and I see a loot of the your videos in YouTube.
    You have in your hands one of mine dreams the Mac Pro Silicon with new chip M2 Ultra, I have my Mac mini from 2018 is to slow to this new days.
    I no cost lot off money maybe on day I buy one , maybe when this Mac have six years or much to the price go down.
    Keep a good work and when you come to Portugal I invite you to eat big meal call francesinha in Viana do Castelo at the Pimenta Doce I’m the owner.
    God bless you and keep good work.

  10. The kicker is even Linus built a pc for cheaper that kicker both in a bunch of benchmarks, the pricing of this makes zero sense for the performance being lackluster compared to Intel and nvidia who they ditched. If they at least allowed GPU’s I could see this having a purpose in the first place, but nah.

  11. I feel like a Mac historian, Having used every kind of computer under the sun for the past 40 years.. what's odd, I'll still prefer a mac OS over the competitors , even if I'm using them at a 50/50 rate… This is horrible news. I feel like Apple is easing out of the computing industry. Windows will always be a failed code scramble… I understand that the folks that love windows won't ever change.. they're computer enthusiasts. I a get work done enthusiast. end of story. Don't come at me with the apps that don't run on Apple. That's not an engineering fault… that's business…