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- So Apple's done it.
They finally completed their Apple Silicon transition.
They said it would take two years, it took closer to three,
but now every single Mac
that was running Intel processors a few short years ago
is running Apple Silicon
from the top to the bottom of their lineup.
And the very last one to get it was this one right here:
the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
And it got it in a weird way.
So let's talk about it.
So there's a whole lineup of Macs
and the bottom of the lineup was the MacBook Air
and the Mac Mini getting M1 and then M2.
Just the the base smallest version
of Apple Silicon on a chip.
Already a massive improvement over the Intel machines.
But then the further up you go,
you get the MacBook Pros with M2 Pro.
This is double the M2.
Then the M2 Max is again double the M2 Pro.
And at the top of the lineup is the new king of the hill,
most powerful chip they make,
in the New Max Studio, which is called the M2 Ultra
which again doubles up the M2 Max.
Literally, I mean it's two M2 Maxs fused together.
This chip is absurdly impressive
which shouldn't be a surprise.
I mean the M1 Ultra was already awesome
and it's what I've been editing on
for basically the past year it's been out.
But M2 Ultra is actually meaningfully better
at a lot of stuff than that one.
It's a solid 15 to 20% faster on single-core performance
which is already excellent,
taking it to the highest mark of any Mac ever.
And it also benchmarked 15 to 20% faster
in multi-core CPU performance,
again, making it the fastest Mac ever tested.
It got better scores in everything across the board.
Geekbench Metal scores are up by 20% in the GPU department
now that it has this new 76-core GPU
which is the one I'm testing.
And there are even certain software optimizations
that improve workflows even more than expected.
So the new Media Engine is a good one
where it would typically excel mainly at parallel workloads.
Like that's why you'd always see 'em talking
about 22 8K ProRes videos at the same time
or whatever it was.
But it can now also point all of its cores
at a single workload for those of us
doing back-to-back exports instead of parallel exports.
So the export time for a sample project I built
with five minute ProRes video
went down from a ridiculous 1:45,
all the way down to a hilariously fast 57 seconds
which is something like an 80% improvement.
It's amazing.
M2 Ultra is truly excellent.
So then the Mac Pro would be the last Mac
to get the Apple Silicon upgrade.
And when it finally did,
look, a lot of us hardware nerds
were getting really excited
about maybe something like a M2 Extreme
which would once again double the M2 Ultra chip
by fusing two together
and being just something mammoth and absurd.
But it didn't.
It didn't.
It's actually the exact same M2 Ultra chip
in both the Mac Studio and the New Mac Pro.
So the natural question that this begs
is why would anyone buy the New Mac Pro?
Like why would anyone in their right mind
spend 3000 more dollars on a machine
that gives you the exact same performance
from the exact same chip in a much bigger, heavier machine?
Well, I'll tell you why 'cause I am one of them,
one of the few, I'll warn you,
but one of the few people that will actually take advantage
of some unique things about this new Mac Pro.
But the fact is, yeah, most people shouldn't
and won't get the new Mac Pro 'cause the Mac Studio exists.
So what's the reason?
Well, there are some smaller details
that are potentially interesting about the new Mac Pro.
Like for example, okay, it's the same chip in each,
but hang on a second.
They're dramatically different sizes.
So maybe, the Mac Pro in a much bigger chassis
with three gigantic fans at the front
and way more space for airflow,
surely there's a slight thermal advantage
to getting the Mac Pro or maybe more sustained performance
over a longer time before throttling.
And technically, yes, I found that to be slightly true
by only like a single-digit percentage in most cases
and often by a rounding error.
But I did do the Cinebench 10-minute stress test
back-to-back three times each
on the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio.
And while the Mac studio dropped
a tiny bit on the second run
and the Mac Pro technically increased slightly with each run
suggesting it wasn't near its limit yet,
it wasn't really that dramatic.
Like I've seen some people get maybe closer
to 8 to 10% out of their tests
but it's not an enough to spend 3,000 more dollars
for more performance outta this machine, put it that way.
But another thing is there is more I/O
on the MAC Pro technically.
I mean it doesn't have
the SD card slot on the front, unfortunately,
which is one of the most important ones.
But it does have a new card at the top here
with six Thunderbolt ports and two more at the front
so totaling eight, which is two more than the Mac Studio.
And it also has two HDMI 2.1 ports instead of one
and two ethernet ports instead of one.
So technically true, yes,
but also you wouldn't spend $3,000 more
on the Mac Pro just for that.
I think people would get dongles for one extra port.
But no, the real difference,
the reason the Mac Pro exists is PCI slots.
Like that's really it.
Like the next time you see a comment
or a a tweet or something of someone going,
"Why does the Mac Pro even exist
when you can get the same computer in a Mac Studio?"
is because this one has PCI slots.
That's the real reason.
The Mac Pro has six open PCI expansion slots
that the Mac Studio does not have,
five of them, PCI Gen 4, the last one, a compatibility slot.
It's kind of funny how empty it looks when you get it.
Like you open this computer up
and the entire thing is just air. (chuckles)
The M2 Ultra is just under this cooler at the top,
the CPU, GPU, shared memory,
the Media Engine, Neural Engine,
everything is just under there.
And then there's just an expanse of room
for all these PCI slots.
And these PCI slots aren't even for video cards
or GPUs at all actually, because as we know the GPU,
which has up to 192 gigs of shared memory,
is built into the Apple Silicon chip.
So really all we're getting the PCI slots for
is expansion slots, the pure dedicated expansion slots
that a lot of pros in certain industries use a lot.
Sound cards, I/O cards, storage cards,
networking cards, that's it.
So yeah, it is really specific
and it will sound ridiculous to most people
that it literally doesn't support video cards.
Like you could pull a crazy AMD Radeon card
out of the old Mac Pro right now
and put it into this thing
and basically nothing would happen.
But also at the same time,
most of the buyers of these Mac Pros
are, you know, production studios,
post houses, music studios, things like that.
Those people already had desktops with PCI slots
and they literally could not make a Mac work
unless they made one with PCI slots.
So that's who Mac Pro is for.
It really is too bad though that technically
this Mac Pro will be less versatile than the old one
because there are people who would want
to throw powerful GPU cores at certain applications
whether it's After Effects or some 3D-modeling stuff,
or Premiere even, that just can't do that with this one.
It also doesn't work with, or apparently even need,
the old Afterburner cards.
So I don't know if you remember,
the Afterburner cards in the old Mac Pro
were basically these dedicated cards,
a $2,000 video accelerator card,
but apparently the M2 Ultra has enough power
that it's the equivalent of like seven Afterburner cards.
So that right there is the real power of Apple Silicon
if you're shooting ProRes.
But the more I think about it, just so much
of this Pro machine stuff is specific to workflows
and it's very difficult to build one computer
with no expansion or upgradability or modularity at all
that works with everyone's workflows.
So there did need to exist a Mac
that could accommodate some more interesting workflows.
But like, I don't shoot ProRes, I shoot R3D,
so I'm not gonna need the exact machine
that's built super well for ProRes.
For me, it's actually storage.
Right here I'm holding OWC'S 8M2 PCI SSD.
This is basically a PCI expansion card
with a bunch of NVMe SSDs on it.
So the max storage you can get built-into the Mac Pro
is 8 terabytes.
And it's pretty fast.
It's 6, 7,000 megabytes per second read/write. Cool.
But you can max out one of these cards at 64 terabytes
and it will read/write at 25,000 megabytes per second,
which is absurd.
So that's a totally different level.
This is what I'm gonna dump footage on.
This is what I'm gonna back up to.
This is going to replace
my current external Thunderbolt backup
which is where I was keeping all my old footage.
It was sitting next to the Mac Studio plugged in
and I'll still have plenty of room left over to work on
and edit multiple video projects off of it at the same time.
It's gonna be awesome for what I do, and I only need one,
but also I fully acknowledge, and you should all realize,
that most people don't need those specialized SSDs.
That's why it looks crazy that this Mac Pro exists
just on the website next to all the rest of the Macs.
But most people should get this one.
Mac Studio was kind of a revelation for Apple.
It's offering their top-of-the-lineup performance
for way less than the old top of the lineup.
And that's why most people should end up getting that one.
I do have one last thing though.
I have a theory.
If I know anything about Apple,
it's that you can sort of predict
the future pretty well based on the past.
And this Mac Pro
is a pretty classic lazy refresh from Apple,
pretty similar to what they've already done.
Like look at the MacBook Air.
When they first went from the last Intel MacBook Air
to the first Apple Silicon MacBook Air.
They reused the exact same design
and just moved the new chip on the inside
for all the performance gains.
Then the second generation of it got the redesign.
Same thing with the MacBook Pro, right?
They took the MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar
and just reused the same design, new chip,
and then the next generation got a redesign.
So now this Mac Pro has just done
the same first half of that transformation.
It's the same exact chassis, more or less,
as the Intel Mac Pro, but I can expect the next generation,
now, I'm already thinking about the M3,
and that's probably kind of unhealthy,
but that's where my mind goes.
That's just my theory.
So anyway, now you know why the Mac Pro exists.
Now you know why I'll have one on my desk.
And I'll also leave you with this:
there was no other place to put it in the review
but I did realize that this Mac Pro
does something kind of weird
when you take the top halfway off
when it's still plugged in.
The old one didn't do it.
So I'm just gonna leave you to it.
Thanks for watching.
Catch you guys to the next one.
Peace.
(Mac fans whir loudly)
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