"it gives us a lot of hope for a repairable, upgradable, and reasonably priced Mac Pro."

If such a thing materialises, I'll take a wild punt on it being designed by the Tooth Fairy, delivered by Santa Claus and powered by Unicorn farts.

A Mac Pro is only reasonably priced if your employer is paying for it.

Otherwise, it only becomes reasonably priced 10 years after it has been released.

The annoying thing is that old mac hardware seems to disappear quite quickly. Either:

- It breaks because frankly the build quality / repairability sucks

- Apple buys it and disposes it as soon as possible to not to "confuse" consumers

- Apple fans keep onto the hardware hoping that one day they can sell it high and unfortunately that day never comes.

The IBM PowerPC architecture is interesting (for OpenBSD) but unfortunately grabbing an old G5 (in decentish condition) is harder than an actual i.e IBM IntelliStation POWER 185 and the latter has the added convenience of getting to play a little with AIX.

You are wrong on a few points.

Build quality is decent. Most of the Macs I see are still useable after 3-5 years. PC laptops are about 3 years tops. (Yes Mac repairability sucks.)

Most Macs are retired because Apple releases a new OS version that make it too slow.

Those overpriced fanboy machines. They actually sell for those prices. (At least local to me they do.)

Apple does offer a buy-back plan, but I seriously doubt anyone uses it. They really don't pay well for the hardware.

Personally I am done with Apple. No RAM upgrades is a total dealbreaker for me.

My new Linux'ed up Thinkpad is pretty sweet. But I accept it lacks any style.

Most Macs are retired because Apple releases a new OS version that make it too slow.

I'm running a Linux home media and mail server on a 2009 Mac Mini that was stuck at El Capitan. Direct boots into Mint; it doesn't even have OSX installed.

A Mac Pro is only reasonably priced if your employer is paying for it.

That's the target market, after all. I mean, as a manufacturer, if you can sell at least some machines for that price, why wouldn't you?

No one needs a high-end luxury car, either; a base trim hatchback will get you places just as well. But that doesn't mean high end cars shouldn't exist, for those who choose to spend their money on such things.

Given the price of the top end Studio Ultra I doubt we'll see "upgradable, and reasonably priced Mac Pro.". The Studio is weird. Being completely locked in (okay the SSD might be upgradable with a software tweak) to the configuration you bought seems stupid. Soldered RAM on a chassis that big is outright retarded. They get points for useful ports though I guess. It's a shame as I really like the Ultra CPU architecture on paper for thread heavy tasks. Oh well.

The RAM isn't soldered, well, not to the motherboard. That would be far too easy to get around for a skilled iron-wielder. Oh no, it's part of the CPU package. I suppose it's conceivable that someone could swap out the entire module, potentially upgrading the processor at the same time.

-A.

I'd completely forgotten about the whole SoC style of it with the shared memory etc. I stand corrected.

I don't know whether un-upgradeable RAM is really an issue for this machine though.

There are only 2 variants you can buy: one has 32 Gb of memory (upgradeable to 64). The other has 64 Gb and is upgradeable to 128 Gb. Of course you choose this "upgrade" at the time of purchase and then it comes with whatever you picked. It's not really "upgradeable" per se.

The different CPUs between the machines are orders of magnitude different: a 10-core M1 with a 24-core GPU, whilst the next model up has a 20-core M1 with a 48-core GPU.

The prices are £2000 and £4000 respectively. That's at the base spec, before applying any "upgrade" to either model. If you go for the top-end (without buying software like Logic Pro) it comes out at £8000. Nobody spending this kind of money buys a machine and goes "I'll probably need to upgrade the RAM in 12 months though...".

Basically I'm not sure how often somebody buying these types of machines would want to upgrade *just* the RAM at some point after purchase. I'd imagine it's more likely they'd just buy the machine in the configuration they wanted (and could afford) at the time. Their next upgrade would likely be a completely different machine.

On lower spec machines, upgrades to RAM would be fair enough, but I don't think many people would have a need to upgrade a machine with 32 Gb of RAM a year or two into using it. It's either good enough for the lifetime you're thinking of using it for, or it's not. Certainly at this end of the market.

Their next upgrade would likely be a completely different machine.

Bloody indeed ...

When that time comes (it does, always) they may finally manage to understand that they should have purchased a different, upgradeable brand/model machine.

That much different.

Probably more than one for the price they would have to put up for another Apple thingy.

O.

This has been solved elsewhere.

Your standard off-the-shelf flash parts are not going to work because they include a flash chip controller and probably some cache RAM. Apple included the flash controller on the CPU (saves part of $1 by not having a separate chip) and use some of the system RAM as cache (probably saves the rest of that $1). Your new storage card will need chips that Apple has created software for, and probably the same type and number of chips as the card in the first slot. Have fun sourcing those.

Your next problem is all the data in the chips is encrypted and the decryption key is in the CPU. If you swap the storage cards between computers the CPU will try to decrypt the data with the wrong key, notice there is a problem and refuse to boot. This is fixable: connect a working Apple computer and it will be able to fix the borked one - by erasing all the data and installing a clean copy of the OS.

I am sure all Apple users are happy with Apple making an extra $1 profit on their new computers and will be [1]overjoyed to pay Apple's monopoly prices for storage upgrades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/explaining-the-mac-studios-removable-ssds-and-why-you-cant-just-swap-them-out/

At least a defective storage module can be replaced without swapping out the entire motherboard.

Baby steps.

From looking on the Apple website the Studio has these ports:

-- 4 x Thunderbolt 4

-- 2 x USB‑A ports

-- HDMI port

-- Ethernet

-- 3.5mm headphone jack

I'm saying this as somebody who is partial to Apple kit... sorry, but when I bought my iPhone 12 or 2020 Macbook Pro, I was reassured that things such as a 3.5mm headphone socket (in the case of the iPhone), or a HDMI port (in the case of the Macbook) were old fashioned and nobody had a use for these things anymore. If I wanted such connectivity I could either buy an adaptor, or make expensive upgrades, e.g. change my perfectly good Samsung HDMI monitor to a USB-C/Thunderbolt one.

If somebody has £2,000+ to spend on a desktop, surely - SURELY - these *are* the people with the newer, more expensive kit to connect it to?

It's almost like an admission that things such as 3.5mm jacks, ethernet and HDMI ports are still incredibly useful... Which is it, Apple?

Which is it, Apple?

Both. By including them in a high-end machine they can stretch the price a bit further and the buyers will pay it without flinching. By leaving them out of a lower-end product they can nickel-and-dime the more price-sensitive end of the market. The more useful these things are, the more you're prepared to pay for them.

@Andy 103

Ask Motorola and Qi (I think that is it's name) about the headphone socket. They did away with them before Apple.

-> Building in the RAM, while perhaps understandable from a performance standpoint

Is that true, that soldered in RAM is faster than RAM in slots? If so, can you point me to a study showing that?

Why do people keep thinking the memory is soldered? It's inside the "CPU" chip package itself. And nobody's pretending that won't give you lots of performance. But presumably one of the downsides of this is the massive cooling needed when you have lots of memory.

-> Why do people keep thinking the memory is soldered?

I think you know exactly what I mean. Built in/soldered on are pretty much interchangeable terms when it comes to chips. The RAM in the CPU chip package is not just held in by paper clips, is it?

Built in and soldered may, arguably, be interchangeable but this isn't really either of those things, it's part of the silicon the CPU itself is built on. It's more akin to upgrading the L3 cache of a (for example) Intel CPU.

So whilst not literally built into CPU directly it's pretty close to it.

I'd argue these days that the RAM the Studio's come with (32GB minimum) should see it remain useful for its working life. Never say never of course (who needs more than 640KB etc) but for me at least the requirements to add RAM every couple of years just to get reasonable performance are long gone. I specced 32GB for my last laptop (in 2018) and as I type this ~24GB is used, but 8GB of that is for file cache.

Of course YMMV.

If so, can you point me to a study showing that?

Not a study per-se, but this is exactly what layer 1 and layer 2 cache is. What apple have done is put the ram on the same die as the CPU. The up side is that they can clock it faster and have more lanes. If you search for more info on the specs there's a bunch of places with more detailed info.

Not true, but irrelevant. The RAM is integrated directly in the SoC package. The bus is thereby both faster and physically shorter.

-A.

always a bummer to see repair and upgrades at the end of the priority list

Always a bummer to see upgrades actively and maliciously blocked by the manufacturer.

>A farewell to the "dongleverse" that has blighted the life of many an Apple fan.

A farewell? Which recent Mac desktop has not had USB A sockets?

The dongleverse may be a thing for some laptops, but why bring it up in an article about a desktop?

"Frustrating for sure, although more annoying is the built-in RAM"

It's a bloody SOC - what do you expect to see?

I'm still expecting someone to release TB4 based RAM - after all if we can accelerate using GPU memory over PCIe and TB carries PCIe natively... it ought to be a close second best, and portable.

This is exactly in line with every previous M1, and just like everyone said, they put two together with an interconnect that was already spotted before with the max chips, Memory is on chip die because it is also graphics memory and unique to the architecture. Previous configs had the same flash storage layout, just not in a socket. They won't sell many of these, so the socket cuts costs. 0 surprises. The real story is how bad the new display is.