A trash can.... Mac :)

[macuserman]

I didn't really look at the benchmarks for this one released (I was focused on how small it is ) but looking now I have to concede. This is a really good computer! If you are doing anything but gaming, (and you don't hate MacOS) this is a no-brainer.

I"m glad you had a look and walked that back, lol. I was about to say the base model mac mini at $600 is being hailed across the industry as best bang for buck, even against PCs. We'll just pretend the ssd, and memory upgrades if you want more than that aren't wildly over priced. But the base model is a rocket ship compared to the 2013 mac pro, hence me saying it was a poor financial decision. I paid $250 for mine plus tax and shipping put it nearly at $300, then I spent a bit more getting memory and CPU upgrades so maybe 375 all in, so less than the $600 but performance per dollar makes it a very poor choice

 

[macuserman]

I think Apple Silicon is really designed for laptops, which it excels at. Not very good for desktops, unless electricity is REALLY expensive where you live.

I think that was true, but that is rapidly changing as they go forward. M4 is really really good. I like the trashcan it's iconic even if it's a "meme", but it may end up as a display piece at some point next year rather than being used much.

 

[CC_333]

What would have made the AS Mac Pro "exciting"? A new enclosure?

Well, no. The fact that it's in the same enclosure is fine (it hearkens back to the PPC --> Intel switch, when the then-new Mac Pro used the same enclosure as the outgoing Power Mac G5).

The fact that it has four PCIe slots is fine too.

What I don't get is that, in a machine with that much internal space, they didn't allow for upgradeable RAM (My understanding is that the point of deleting slots was to save space so Apple could make their laptops thinner, but the Mac Pro? Come on now, that's just cheating people out of one of the few remaining advantages the traditional tower format had over its smaller relatives, which was to buy it with the more affordable base RAM and upgrade later as needed). Add to that the fact that the AS Mac Pro's performance is identical to the Mac Studio, a much smaller computer with a much smaller price tag (relatively speaking).

It doesn't need that much space for four PCIe slots; Many PCs have had at least that many slots in towers half the size for many years.

In summary, I feel like the AS Mac Pro is a waste of time and resources. The only remaining advantage is PCIe slots, and even that's getting iffy, since GPUs explicitly won't work (and GPU cards are, as far as I know, among the most common upgrades). I guess the reasoning for this is that the AS chip's own GPU is good enough that it never needs upgrading, but there are use cases where having another GPU or two can be useful, so I'm not really sure what the point is).

But the base model is a rocket ship compared to the 2013 mac pro, hence me saying it was a poor financial decision. I paid $250 for mine plus tax and shipping put it nearly at $300, then I spent a bit more getting memory and CPU upgrades so maybe 375 all in, so less than the $600 but performance per dollar makes it a very poor choice

Well, it's all relative. If $375 is all you can afford and you're upgrading from, say, a 2006/2007/2008 Mac Pro or a Core2 Duo iMac or Mac Mini, the 2013 Mac Pro is going to feel astronomically fast by comparison and will serve well for at least another year or two, maybe three.

But if you're trying to compare it to even a modern PC, let alone an AS Mac, then yeah. The 2013 Mac Pro is hopelessly outmoded and completely pointless to spend 357 cents on, let alone 357 dollars.

c

 

[macuserman]

Well, it's all relative. If $375 is all you can afford and you're upgrading from, say, a 2006/2007/2008 Mac Pro or a Core2 Duo iMac or Mac Mini, the 2013 Mac Pro is going to feel astronomically fast by comparison and will serve well for at least another year or two, maybe three.

But if you're trying to compare it to even a modern PC, let alone an AS Mac, then yeah. The 2013 Mac Pro is hopelessly outmoded and completely pointless to spend 357 cents on, let alone 357 dollars.

c

I hear what your saying, but at the same time we are talking about a difference of $225, and that is with me price shopping aggressively for mine with D700s making offers on eBay over and over etc. Used M4 minis are already hitting eBay...


I feel like at that price difference I don't care who you are you should save your pennies and wait vs saying welp $375 is my max budget.... Just for the ability to run current mac OS support alone not even taking to account performance.

 

[joshc]

Even an M1 mini would be a better purchase than a 2013 Mac Pro at this point.

 

[macuserman]

Even an M1 mini would be a better purchase than a 2013 Mac Pro at this point.

Very true, you can pick one up for $350 on eBay if you shop. Although the M1 mini does have some drawbacks that the M4 does not have which makes it worth it for me to skip it. When they get down to $100-150 range I think they will be killer machines to pick up to just use for whatever.

 

[CC_333]

I feel like at that price difference I don't care who you are you should save your pennies and wait vs saying welp $375 is my max budget.... Just for the ability to run current mac OS support alone not even taking to account performance.

Good point. I guess at this point, about the only context in which spending money on the 2013 Mac Pro makes any sense is as a collectible.

c

 

[macuserman]

Good point. I guess at this point, about the only context in which spending money on the 2013 Mac Pro makes any sense is as a collectible.

c

For sure, also take everything I say with a large dose of salt given I bought a 2013 mac pro myself this year.

 

[quinterro]

The second Mac Pro arrived this afternoon. It was an upgraded quad-core model and has the D300 GPUs. However, the fan works!

It also works with the 64GB memory upgrade I purchased for the first one.

 

[Byrd]

That’s cool, enjoy! Another upgrade that’s getting cheap now is an EGPU

 

[quinterro]

Good point. I guess at this point, about the only context in which spending money on the 2013 Mac Pro makes any sense is as a collectible.

c

I was also thinking if you were writing cross-platform applications and required a Mac with Xcode to compile the MacOS/iOS/tvOS versions, then a cheap Mac Pro that doesn’t take much space would do nicely.

I have tried this with my i5 2012 Mac Mini. While it worked, the Mac Mini was a bit sluggish - even with 16GB memory and a SSD for storage. A few extra cores and threads along with 4x the memory should be able to compile it even faster.

I plan to give it a try this evening on the Mac Pro once I figure out how to again.

 

[Hopfenholz]

I just find it so irritating that Apple hobble their machines with this inability to upgrade / expand. It must be purely a commercial thing but it goes against every engineering and sustainability principle. One wonders how rich the company feels it needs to be before they can do the right thing

 

[joshc]

I just find it so irritating that Apple hobble their machines with this inability to upgrade / expand. It must be purely a commercial thing but it goes against every engineering and sustainability principle. One wonders how rich the company feels it needs to be before they can do the right thing

I don't understand the frustration. As I said further up in this thread, I never needed to upgrade my 2012 MBP beyond what I originally upgraded it with, and my current M1 MBP was bought with a high spec so again it should last for the useful lifetime of the machine. RAM and disk upgrades don't really make much difference once the machine is considered 'obsolete' by Apple and doesn't receive security updates anymore.

 

[Unknown_K]

I don't think pouring money into any 2013 machine make sense other than from a collecting standpoint. There are plenty of much newer machines being ewasted that are faster.

 

[quinterro]

It’s not really pouring money into it, more like a trickle.

Found the 12-core Xeon processor on eBay for $25, so I snagged it.

I’m using the Mac Pro, sadly doing the same thing I did with the HP t740 thin client: playing games, web browsing, and watching YouTube videos. If it weren’t sitting on a TV tray with an 11” portable monitor I would be doing more with it.

 

[quinterro]

I have moved the Mac Pro into my home office. Now I should be able to do more productive things with it.

 

[Cory5412]

We're in such a wild time because it feels like Macs, even decade-old ones, are holding value way better than they did like 20 years ago.

The Plateau makes things so wild, too. Like, any Mac Pro 6,1 with a quad, 16GB of RAM, and working GPUs is arguably "on-Plateau" in a way that 2012/14 Mac minis with dual-core CPUs might not, at least for anyone with web-heavy and multi-tasking oriented work.

A 2012 quad-core Mac mini tiptopped with 16GB of RAM and a decent SSD seems like it "should" be basically fine for basic desktop usage, but I can 100% see how upgrading to the higher end system for multmedia authoring, technical computing, development, would be more appropriate.

Not to put too fine a point on it but: This is identical to what the state of play would have been with these two products in 2013 when the Mac Pro 6,1 was new, with the caveat that basic desktop usage would've been way easier on a duallie mini in 2012-13 than it is today.

But not only will the M1 outperform almost all Mac Pro 6,1 configs, the 2018 Mac mini will, core-for-core, outperform a 2013 Mac Pro (albeit less dramatically, it'll be like a couple percent probably). (So, you can make an argument about 8/12-core models, and/or any workload that needs the dedicated OpenCL grunt on the FirePro, ahead of just adding an eGPU to a 2018 Mac mini.)

It is wild how good the newest Apple Silicon Macs are, and, genuine "finally" on 16GB of RAM being baseline.

Goes to show how uninteresting Apple has become. They release a new system and nobody seems to care.

This is a you thing. Almost everybody else noticed and there was much discussion about the meta of it. I'm pretty sure there was even a Lounge thread about the announcement, and likely a discussion about how the Mac Studio is the same computer but for half the money.

Apple Silicon RAM is not just soldered but it's on-package. In so doing, it's some if not the fastest RAM in the industry, with the highest memory bandwidth available anywhere, as far as I know off hand.

Flexibility comes at a price and sometimes that price is speed. The hot reality of it is that Mac Pros especially are professional computers used by professionals in their speed who need that speed above absolutely all else.

Entertainingly, the SATA ports are still present, so you can still add slow or slightly-less-slow bulk storage if needed.

do the right thing

Ultimately, for Apple, doing the right thing by their customers is providing the fastest possible computer. I would agree that their upgrades, especially on the Mac mini, which is hands down the best $600 in computing right now, cost too much, and that they don't make it easy enough to use external storage for certain situations where it would make sense.

But alluding to what joshc wrote, we've been doing this whole "computing" thing for a long time by now, and any reasonably technical customer who has some reason to buy a Mac, should be reasonably capable of measuring what their workload needs, and predicting how different options in a new computer will impact or improve their work.

If you want to get real silly, I would actually argue that, in terms of the environment, knowingly buying an underspecified new computer and then immediately installing a bunch of upgrades is bad, as it creates ewaste, as often the baseline components can't easily be reused elsewhere and might not be suitable for, say, upgrading an older system.

I have tens of thousands of words on this thought process but the short version is that historically speaking, running brand new commercial software on 10+ year-old hardware, with it's original CPU, is totally unprecedented. It's so nice that we have this option, but we'd do well to remember that this basically wasn't reasonable or possible a decade ago.

The rate of change on needs for basic desktop, productivity, and web usage has slowed significantly. I have no trouble whatsoever believing that a baseline M4 Mac mini purchased today for basic desktop computing will still be reasonably useful in a decade, for basic desktop computing.

 

[Unknown_K]

I expect some kind of new thing to show up eventually that will need some kind of AI processor or use massive amounts of memory to make current low spec systems obsolete. It's the only way to push new purchases other than making the OS more secure and locking out all the old hardware like Windows 11.

 

[Cory5412]

Right now, AI is the reason 16GB is starting to become the minimum on new computer models. It's the baseline for Apple Intelligence and MS Copilot+, and the reason we're starting to see 16GB because the default base memory allocation on new computers.

The Windows 11 thing is fairly shenanigans, and Microsoft appears to know it, especially since Windows Server 2025 basically runs on all the same hardware as Windows 10, but we'll see how that plays out.

The benefits of TPM are real, it actually does a legitimate job, but it's a job that's probably not important on most personal/home/endpoint computers.

 

[Cory5412]

I alluded to this the other day in another thread but modern CPUs all have neural processing units, and graphical execution units that support the newest video codecs.

Right now, most software can either avoid the neural processing units, or outright doesn't use them except for first-party stuff like Apple Intelligence and Copilot+ itself. I don't know if those things have become standards yet, or if they ever will, kind of like how CUDA and OpenCL are still not really compatible.

Desktop experience computing remains "fine" without these specific task accelerators, so far. macOS probably uses them for some legit work, such as face detection in the Photos app. But, Windows 11 runs fine on, say, the Intel N100, which lacks basically anything that wasn't in CPUs in like 2015 or so, but I'd have to double-check specific details, regardless, like Windows+Office+Web would work fine on an N100.)

One more thought: It's fine to want an internally flexible computer. I still buy internally flexible computers, primarily, as a Windows user. But, I wouldn't moralize it, because there's plenty of fixed-configuration computers outside of the Mac realm. Especially on the RAM front, which is historically the more difficult and more important upgrade.