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What is the point of the MacPro? (beehaw.org)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I fail to see the purpose of a MacPro over a Mac Studio.

I know it has pci slots, but can someone tell me how they will realistically be used? Used in a way that can't be done with thunderbolt.

The pricing seems absurd compared to a Mac Studio.

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[–] muddybulldog 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It's a pretty niche product and most of the advantages over the Mac Studio are really not consumer facing.

While the cooling solution in the Studio is quite good, the Mac Pro's larger chassis should allow for even better cooling which may allow for greater sustained workloads, such as video transcoding and all types of rendering.

While the Studio makes sense for end-users, if you have have a shop that does distributed computing, rendering, etc. the rack mount option is appealing as you can have all the horsepower and supporting infrastructure, e.g. networking, power, tucked away neatly in a closet as opposed to sprawled across your workspace.

Thunderbolt is great for attaching external consumer storage, but if you have petabytes of video and audio stored on a fibre-channel NAS or DAS, with multiple users accessing it, that's not the type of thing you're going to sustain on people's desktops.

Its primary target is medium to large scale, distributed computing. It's not a high end desktop, it's a server class device.