The Apple Silicon transition is complete; quite frankly, not everyone made it. There are going certain use cases that were served by Intel Macs that the new Mac Studio and Mac Pro just aren’t designed for. However, this article is not about them. Let’s talk about who each is designed for.
Mac Studio
If you need the most CPU and GPU power available on macOS, chances are this is for you. Apple made it official during the keynote, the Mac Studio replaced the 27” iMac and iMac Pro. It’ll give you everything the Mac Pro does except for PCI-E Expansion, but in a more portable and desktop-friendly design. The Mac Studio is what Apple wanted the Second Generation Trashcan Mac Pro to be.
While the Mac Studio doesn’t have the internal expansion of the Mac Pro, it has a wide array of Thunderbolt 3/4 external expansion, and because Apple wisely gave the Studio the same footprint as the Mac Mini, it can easily use docks and hubs designed for its shorter sibling.
Lastly, if you don’t need the power of the M2 Ultra, and just need the Mac, this is your ride. The Mac Studio is also the best best for gaming on the Mac. Yes, it does happen despite what the gatekeepers may say.
Mac Pro
For the three use cases I see for the Mac Pro, I believe most of the ones Apple says may be rack-mounted. This will not be in a macOS data center since Sonnet already has a Rackmac Studio 3U dual rackmount with additional storage bays for the more diminutive professional Mac. So, what does an additional $3000 get you over the base M2 Ultra Mac Studio? A very expensive, but capable expansion chassis.
I’ll start out with who this is not for, if you need Ultimate compute power, this isn’t it. The 76-core M2 Ultra cannot touch the power of twin w6800 Duo MPX cards that the 2019 model had, and it maxes out at 192GB of non-ECC memory as opposed to 1.5TB of ECC Memory. Same as the Studio. If any of that matters to you, unfortunately, this is the end of the line for those users and the Mac. Since the Mac Pro’s scope is far more limited, it also maxes out at less than $12,500 in the highest-end rack mount variant before taxes.
The power of the Mac Pro comes from internal storage and PCI-E expansion, though in some use cases, they may be synonymous. The new Mac Pro has 2 available x16 and four available x8 slots, all Gen4. It also has up to 300w of auxiliary power through two 6-pin and one 8-pin connector. There are also two SATA ports and an internal USB-A. Since it uses the same case as its Intel predecessor, it’s compatible with all the accessories of the previous Mac Pro. That’s great because there’s no native place to mount the SATA drives.
So what can you do with those slots? Lots of things. The two x16 and 3 of the 4 x8 slots are dual height and there’s more enough space to do audio and video production in the same machine. There’s also additional space for networking cards if the standard twin 10gig ports aren’t enough. The big use case will be storage. While the new Mac Pro has its own proprietary SSDs, don’t touch them. If you get an x16 NVME adapter card or two, each of which can hold up to 8 TB SSDs if money is no issue. If money is a bit of an issue, 4TB drives are about 1/3rd of the price, either way, that’s a lot of ultra-fast storage.
Of course, there are also options to mix and match between internal and external storage with 8 Thunderbolt 4 slots. 2 on the top (front for the rack) and 6 on the back. There is no shortage of options for A/V professionals.
Final Thoughts
This is going to be very brief. Quite frankly, since there are no CPU or graphics differences between the two Macs, the Mac Studio is the new Mac Pro for most. Only if you need the PCI-E slots in a way that cannot be served by Thunderbolt 4, then get Mac Pro. If you need expandable RAM or graphics, then, unfortunately, it's Windows or Linux for you. The Mac has become a specialist platform.
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