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00:00So Apple's done it, they finally completed their Apple Silicon transition.
00:07They said it would take two years, it took closer to three, but now every single Mac
00:11that was running Intel processors a few short years ago is running Apple Silicon from the
00:16top to the bottom of their lineup.
00:17And the very last one to get it was this one right here, the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
00:23And it got it in a weird way.
00:25So let's talk about it.
00:26This is the full lineup of Macs and the bottom of the lineup was the MacBook Air and the
00:30Mac Mini getting M1 and then M2, just the base smallest version of Apple Silicon on
00:36a chip.
00:37Already a massive improvement over the Intel machines, but then the further up you go,
00:40you get the MacBook Pros with M2 Pro.
00:44This is double the M2.
00:47Then the M2 Max is again double the M2 Pro.
00:52And at the top of the lineup is the new king of the hill, most powerful chip they make
00:57in the new Mac studio, which is called the M2 Ultra, which again doubles up the M2 Max.
01:05Literally, I mean, it's two M2 Maxes fused together.
01:08This chip is absurdly impressive, which shouldn't be a surprise.
01:12I mean, the M1 Ultra was already awesome and it's what I've been editing on for basically
01:16the past year it's been out.
01:18But M2 Ultra is actually meaningfully better at a lot of stuff than that one.
01:21It's a solid 15 to 20% faster on single core performance, which is already excellent, taking
01:27it to the highest mark of any Mac ever.
01:29And it also benchmarked 15 to 20% faster in multi-core CPU performance, again, making
01:33it the fastest Mac ever tested.
01:35It got better scores in everything across the board.
01:38Geekbench Metal scores are up by 20% in the GPU department.
01:41Now that it has this new 76 core GPU, which is the one I'm testing.
01:45And there are even certain software optimizations that improve workflows even more than expected.
01:50So the new media engine is a good one where it would typically excel mainly at parallel
01:55workloads.
01:56Like that's why you'd always see them talking about 22 8K ProRes videos at the same time
01:59or whatever it was.
02:01But it can now also point all of its cores at a single workload for those of us doing
02:06back to back exports instead of parallel exports.
02:09So the export time for a sample project I built with five minute ProRes video went down
02:14from a ridiculous one minute 45 seconds all the way down to a hilariously fast 57 seconds,
02:21which is something like an 80% improvement.
02:24It's amazing.
02:25M2 Ultra is truly excellent.
02:27So then the Mac Pro would be the last Mac to get the Apple Silicon upgrade.
02:31And when it finally did, look, a lot of us hardware nerds were getting really excited
02:36about maybe something like a M2 Extreme, which would once again double the M2 Ultra
02:44chip by fusing two together and being just something mammoth and absurd.
02:50But it didn't.
02:52It didn't.
02:53It's actually the exact same M2 Ultra chip in both the Mac Studio and the new Mac Pro.
02:59So the natural question that this begs is why would anyone buy the new Mac Pro?
03:05Like why would anyone in their right mind spend $3,000 more on a machine that gives
03:09you the exact same performance from the exact same chip in a much bigger, heavier machine?
03:13Well, I'll tell you why, because I am one of them.
03:16One of the few, I'll warn you, but one of the few people that will actually take advantage
03:19of some unique things about this new Mac Pro.
03:23But the fact is, yeah, most people shouldn't and won't get the new Mac Pro because the
03:29Mac Studio exists.
03:30So what's the reason?
03:31Well, there are some smaller details that are potentially interesting about the new
03:34Mac Pro.
03:35Like, for example, okay, it's the same chip in each, but hang on a second, they're dramatically
03:40different sizes.
03:41So maybe the Mac Pro in a much bigger chassis with three gigantic fans at the front and
03:47way more space for airflow, surely there's a slight thermal advantage to getting the
03:51Mac Pro or maybe more sustained performance over a longer time before throttling.
03:56And technically, yes, I found that to be slightly true.
04:01By only like a single digit percentage in most cases, and often by a rounding error.
04:05But I did do the Cinebench 10 minute stress test back to back three times each on the
04:09Mac Pro and the Mac Studio.
04:12And while the Mac Studio dropped a tiny bit on the second run, and the Mac Pro technically
04:16increased slightly with each run, suggesting it wasn't near its limit yet, it wasn't really
04:22that dramatic.
04:23Like, I've seen some people get maybe closer to eight to 10% out of their tests, but it's
04:27not enough to spend $3,000 more for more performance out of this machine, put it that
04:33way.
04:34But another thing is, there is more IO on the Mac Pro, technically, I mean, it doesn't
04:38have the SD card slot on the front, unfortunately, which is one of the most important ones.
04:42But it does have a new card at the top here with six Thunderbolt ports and two more at
04:48the front.
04:49So totaling eight, which is two more than the Mac Studio, and it also has two HDMI 2.1
04:54ports instead of one, and two Ethernet ports instead of one.
04:58So technically true, yes, but also you wouldn't spend $3,000 more on the Mac Pro just for
05:03that.
05:04I think people would get dongles for one extra port.
05:06But no, the real difference, the reason the Mac Pro exists is PCI slots.
05:11Like that's, that's really it.
05:13Like the next time you see a comment or a tweet or something of someone going, why does
05:16the Mac Pro even exist when you can get the same computer in a Mac Studio?
05:20It's because this one has PCI slots.
05:23That's the real reason.
05:24The Mac Pro has six open PCI expansion slots that the Mac Studio does not have.
05:29Five of them, PCI Gen 4, the last one, a compatibility slot.
05:33It's kind of funny how empty it looks when you get it, like you open this computer up
05:38and the entire thing is just air.
05:41The M2 Ultra is just under this cooler at the top, the CPU, GPU, shared memory, the
05:46media engine, neural engine, everything is just under there.
05:49And then there's just an expansive room for all these PCI slots.
05:53These PCI slots aren't even for video cards or GPUs at all, actually, because as we know,
06:01the GPU, which has 192 up to 192 gigs of shared memory is built into the Apple Silicon chip.
06:08So really all we're getting the PCI slots for is expansion slots, the pure dedicated
06:14expansion slots that a lot of pros in certain industries use a lot.
06:20So, yeah, it is really specific and it will sound ridiculous to most people that it literally
06:30doesn't support video cards.
06:31Like you could pull a crazy AMD Radeon card out of the old Mac Pro right now and put it
06:37into this thing and basically nothing would happen.
06:40But also at the same time, most of the buyers of these Mac Pros are, you know, production
06:45studios, post houses, music studios, things like that.
06:48Those people already had desktops with PCI slots and they literally could not make a
06:53Mac work unless they made one with PCI slots.
06:55So that's who Mac Pro is for.
06:58It really is too bad, though, that technically this Mac Pro will be less versatile than the
07:02old one because there are people who would want to throw powerful GPU cores at certain
07:07applications, whether it's After Effects or some 3D modeling stuff or Premiere even, that
07:13just can't do that with this one.
07:16It also doesn't work with or apparently even need the old Afterburner cards.
07:20So I don't know if you remember the Afterburner cards and the old Mac Pro were basically these
07:23dedicated cards, a $2,000 video accelerator card.
07:28But apparently the M2 Ultra has enough power that it's the equivalent of like seven Afterburner
07:34cards.
07:35So that right there is the real power of Apple Silicon if you're shooting ProRes.
07:39But the more I think about it, just so much of this Pro machine stuff is specific to workflows.
07:47And it's very difficult to build one computer with no expansion or upgradability or modularity
07:53at all that works with everyone's workflows.
07:57So there did need to exist a Mac that could accommodate some more interesting workflows.
08:03But like, I don't shoot ProRes, I shoot R3D, so I'm not going to need the exact machine
08:08that's built super well for ProRes.
08:10For me, it's actually storage.
08:13Right here I'm holding OWC's 8M2 PCI SSD.
08:17This is basically a PCI expansion card with a bunch of NVMe SSDs on it.
08:21So the max storage you can get built into the Mac Pro is eight terabytes.
08:27And it's pretty fast.
08:28It's six, 7,000 megabytes per second read-write, cool.
08:33But you can max out one of these cards at 64 terabytes, and it will read-write at 25,000
08:42megabytes per second, which is absurd.
08:45So that's a totally different level.
08:47This is what I'm going to dump footage on.
08:48This is what I'm going to back up to.
08:50This is going to replace my current external Thunderbolt backup, which is where I was keeping
08:55all my old footage.
08:56It was sitting next to the Mac Studio plugged in, and I'll still have plenty of room left
09:00over to work on and edit multiple video projects off of it at the same time.
09:04It's going to be awesome for what I do, and I only need one.
09:07But also I fully acknowledge, and you should all realize that most people don't need those
09:12specialized SSDs.
09:14That's why it looks crazy that this Mac Pro exists just on the website next to all the
09:17rest of the Macs.
09:18But most people should get this one.
09:21Mac Studio is kind of a revelation for Apple.
09:23It's offering their top of the lineup performance for way less than the old top of the lineup.
09:31And that's why most people should end up getting that one.
09:32I do have one last thing though.
09:34I have a theory.
09:37If I know anything about Apple, it's that you can sort of predict the future pretty
09:41well based on the past.
09:44And this Mac Pro is a pretty classic lazy refresh from Apple.
09:50Pretty similar to what they've already done.
09:52Like look at the MacBook Air.
09:54When they first went from the last Intel MacBook Air to the first Apple Silicon MacBook Air,
09:59they reused the exact same design and just moved the new chip on the inside for all the
10:03performance gains.
10:04Then the second generation of it got the redesign.
10:07Same thing with the MacBook Pro, right?
10:08They took the MacBook Pro with the touch bar and just reused the same design, new chip,
10:13and then the next generation got a redesign.
10:16So now this Mac Pro has just done the same first half of that transformation.
10:21It's the same exact chassis, more or less, as the Intel Mac Pro.
10:26What I can expect in next generation now, I'm already thinking about the M3, and that's
10:31probably kind of unhealthy, but that's where my mind goes.
10:35That's just my theory.
10:36So anyway, now you know why the Mac Pro exists.
10:38Now you know why I'll have one on my desk, and I'll also leave you with this.
10:42There was no other place to put it in the review, but I did realize that this Mac Pro
10:46does something kind of weird when you take the top halfway off when it's still plugged
10:49in.
10:50The old one didn't do it, so I'm just going to leave you to it.
10:52Thanks for watching.
10:53Catch you guys in the next one.
10:55Peace.