Roger’s $0.02 - Why Does the Mac Pro M2 Exist? (Patreon)

Among the stream of announcements Apple made at last week’s WWDC, there was one highly anticipated product unveiling that everyone had been expecting. A product that many had heard rumored about on forums and on tech blogs by analysts. Something that everyone expected to happen months prior. I of course refer to the long-awaited unveiling of the Mac Pro M2. The long-awaited Apple SoC-powered Mac Pro machine users have been demanding. Yet after its unveiling, I was left with one singular question. Who is this product category for? A machine that starts at $6999 and can easily be optioned to a price over $12,000 but features the same exact SoC, RAM, and storage options as the far cheaper Mac Studio.

According to Apple’s site, the difference in price between a fully optioned Mac Pro M2 and an identically optioned Mac Studio is $4000 before sales tax. The difference between the machines amount to the number of connections available on the Mac Pro; four additional Thunderbolt (USB-C) ports, internal SATA connections, one additional HDMI, one additional Ethernet port, and two x16 and four x8 PCIe gen 4 slots. And here’s the kicker the PCIe slots that can't be used to install additional GPUs. That’s right six PCIe slots and no GPU option for any of them. NVMe, broadcast level AV I/O, capture cards, and networking yes. For graphics, you’re stuck with the M2, which let's be fair, is a pretty impressive performer but it seems a glaring omission to leave out GPU support. It could be that Apple’s PCIe integration with its M2 SoC requires complications for GPU support, or that Apple has little appetite to deal with the complexity of 3rd party video drivers. All of which implies a very specific use case scenario. And since the machine comes in both tower and rack mount cases it could be integrated in a wide variety of environments.

The limitation of the PCIe bus to storage and I/O could mean it's intended as a super fast storage SAN for live 4k/8k RAW video ingestion. Something like in a broadcast studio or TV/movie shoots where digital cine cameras have high bandwidth workflows. It’s not out of the realm of reason, but to be frank there are existing PC solutions that do this same job for half the cost of a fully specced-up Mac Pro M2 with better after-sales support. The other possible reason for its existence is as a workstation for app developers, content creators, and studios developing the Apple Vision Pro. The specs alone for Vision Pro demand content creation hardware that handles 23 million pixel displays, 12 cameras, six microphones, and five sensor inputs. While the M2 Ultra SoC could handle it the Mac Studio might not have enough high-speed storage to fulfill the immersive experience Apple will demand from developers. The Thunderbolt 4 ports on the Mac Studio only have 4 lanes of PCIe Gen 3 worth of bandwidth, 5GB/s, while the Mac Pro theoretically has up to 128GB/s of bandwidth across the bus. Outside of those scenarios, it's cheaper to just buy a PC along with a Mac Studio if you need to ingest work. $3000 can get you a decently outfitted PC with a decently fast recent gen Intel or AMD processor and high-end GP and still leave you enough for sizable storage. Plus you get two machines instead of just one letting a group tackle multiple tasks without waiting for a machine to be open.

When Apple shifted to making its Mac silicon in-house the result was a series of SoCs that eschewed the flexibility of the previous Intel models where you could upgrade machines during their lifecycle and instead went for high bandwidth and high-efficiency process that effectively “sealed the box” for user upgrades. The Mac Pro in its own way is trying to straddle that model. You’re locked into whatever M2 Max or Ultra SoC and RAM you’ve ordered and combined with the flexibility of an open architecture PCIe bus for reasons. It will be interesting to see who ultimately gets a Mac Pro over a Mac Studio and their specific use cases.