CGI, CAD, rendering, driving huge screens, running live sporting events, scientific workloads, massive simultaneous automated app testing, etc. Just because you can’t imagine why someone would need that much compute doesn’t mean the use cases don’t exist.
I did not say -- at all -- that I can't imagine that kind of power requirement.
Not at all.
What I said if you read the rest of my comments is that I find it difficult to believe there is a specifically single-desktop-machine use case for that kind of power over and above the Mac Studio.
The reason I mention this is that high end (TV and cinema) CGI just is not the domain of single machines anymore; it's the domain of render farms. The people who do that kind of work for TV and cinema now expect to run farms of commodity hardware that can be swapped out and replaced. And that technology is available to everyone in a way that can be constructed more pragmatically.
Scientific workloads, similarly: most of that market is not going to spend a bucketload on a single Mac when they can spread their risk with cluster computing.
App testing: again, an application for clustering, and low cost hardware spreads risk.
So my point, again: given the existence of the iMac Pro line, and the M1 Ultra Mac Studio (with its evident astonishing GPU performance), given that I imagine most Mac Pro users never put an expansion card in their machines (which is the grand theme of Apple -- people don't upgrade or expand, usually), and given that cluster hardware is commonly in use and well-supported, is the niche for single mega-expensive desktops really big enough?
I don't think it is -- you think it is. But I think you can disagree with me without imagining me stupid, as I disagree with you without doing the same.
The real-time rendering demos of the Studio were incredible. If the pro is 4x that it would be insanely cool. If I were still doing music videos I’d kill to have one of those on set. Or what we did for Kanye’s Yeezus tour (live motion tracking of the dancers with some kinects and putting them into models projected on the screen) - could’ve been so much cooler with this much compute in a small box. You’re talking about this as if you have knowledge from working in an industry that you clearly haven’t. $100,000 fragile rack or $8,000 shoe box you can drop and it’ll still work fine.
The visual arts this thing is going to enable us going to be amazing, and we haven’t even seen the Pro yet. One former client has been texting me all day about ideas from 10 years ago that weren’t feasible but now are with this lil thing. I keep telling him to wait for the Pro then we can take some REALLY neat ideas off the shelf.
> I keep telling him to wait for the Pro then we can take some REALLY neat ideas off the shelf.
Aside from the fact that you're making my point for me -- you think the Mac Studio could do the job you imagine a Mac Pro doing -- there is this:
You tell your former customers to wait for an unreleased, as yet unscheduled update to a product to which historically Apple has displayed considerable, time-insensitive indifference, rather than order maybe multiples of the product that has been announced, or try to make it work somehow with kit that exists?
I'll note down your prediction about $8000. That, I guess, would be interesting. But if it's that cheap it's going to be after the chip shortage is over, surely.
