Mac Pro and Mac Studio: First Look

so here at WWDC 2023 we got not one but two new desktop computers from Apple not something you always hear about now even though they're new they're not brand new they're updates to existing models obviously the Mac Studio everybody knows that that's actually a purely new system uh just debuted last year but the Mac Studio is getting some big updates but more importantly and more excitingly

front so this time around no new design for the Mac Pro it's still the you know Tower desktop with the cheese grater front the big differences are inside it is the last or it was the last Intel Mac that Apple sold that is now gone it has now made the transition to Apple silicon and the chip inside really the only chip option you have is a

pretty crazy one it is the M2 Ultra which is the highest end Mac chip you can get is basically two M2 Max's uh you know glued together so tremendous amount of performance from it and you don't even have the option of getting a lower end one that's where you start and that's why the starting price is a pretty insane 6999 I'm just gonna go crazy and

call it seven thousand dollars or you know two Vision Pro headsets now why would you want a Mac Pro desktop if you can also get the M2 Ultra in other devices like the Mac Studio and that's because that Mac Pro has expandability it has those PCI slots it's got six of them actually and you can get all kinds of aftermarket cards and put them into you

know augment your inputs and outputs in your video and your audio it's really specialized stuff so if you need that kind of extra power for your photo and video and audio projects you probably know that you've been waiting for Apple to finally Sunset that old Intel version that's a couple years old at this point and just get fully into the Apple silicon game with this so

the Mac Pro it has got eight Thunderbolt ports now that's twice as many as it did before it supports PCI Gen 4 that's very fast and again you get six slots for that if you want to use that now if you don't want to spend seven thousand dollars and you don't really need PCI cards you can also just get the Mac Studio that's something that's kind

of halfway between the Mac Pro and the Mac Mini it's a little bit thicker it's like a couple of Mac minis stacked on top of each other but now of course instead of the M1 Max and M1 Ultra you can now get the M2 Max and the M2 Ultra with it and of course it's a lot less expensive because you're not building this big chassis with

the PCI slots in it and all the other bells and whistles that the Mac Pro has it's just kind of a slightly chunky looking you know Mac Mini that now we know is the Mac Studio so that's going to be two thousand dollars to start and of course if you want that Ultra chip in it and you know a lot of RAM and a lot of

storage and all the other extras it's going to cost a lot more but I think you're gonna have trouble getting up to seven thousand dollars but I'm sure I'm sure Apple will find a way that you can spend seven thousand dollars on one of these even though it's a lot less expensive the Mac Studio is nothing to sneeze at it supports higher bandwidth HDMI this time

around you can actually support six of those xdr Pro displays from your Mac Studio you can power them all at once uh so I can see people doing some really impressive stuff with this ISO some demos where they were running you know 70 tracks of audio and syncing it to a to a movie clip at the same time uh you know the kind of stuff that

you really need in professional situations and that's what the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro are they're professional tools not really for consumers for consumers Apple of course has other devices that they are more than happy to hook you up with so we didn't get a new design for the Mac Pro this year okay but we got uh new Apple silicon on the inside we fully

moved past the Intel era and that's a pretty big refresh even if it's only under the surface