In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

Yes, but you can buy thunderbolt pcie expansion units for a lot less than the price difference between the Studio and the Pro.

I think it's simply about having more of everything - expansion wise - on the Pro box. For those that need it of course and are prepared to pay, otherwise yeah the Studio is awesome As said the Pro is a niche machine in the line up.

Just saw a price comparison.

Full specced Intel Mac Pro - $52,000
Fully specced M2 Ultra Mac Pro - $6,200 (with 16 more GPU cores that specced up Studio and starts at 32gb RAM, BTW)

I would imagine that Apple has listened carefully to the fairly niche market for these things and have studios=uly given the market what it asked for - pci slots.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

Well, they did it. An M2 Ultra Mac Studio in a MacPro case 😉

With a few PCEi slots...

Only $6,999

How is that going to work I wonder? That means that any hardware that uses the PCIE slots will need drivers and to be honest I can't see many hardware manufactures writing drivers for their hardware for Mac silicon.,
No memory expansion, I can kind of understand why.

Is it possible to expand the storage in the machine?

In reply to a post by ian_c:

Just saw a price comparison.

Full specced Intel Mac Pro - $52,000
Fully specced M2 Ultra Mac Pro - $6,200 (with 16 more GPU cores that specced up Studio and starts at 32gb RAM, BTW)

I would imagine that Apple has listened carefully to the fairly niche market for these things and have studios=uly given the market what it asked for - pci slots.

i am happy with my Mac mini m2 pro, it does what I need.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Is it possible to expand the storage in the machine?

Yes. Either via PCIe or Thunderbolt.

In reply to a post by ian_c:

Just saw a price comparison.

Full specced Intel Mac Pro - $52,000
Fully specced M2 Ultra Mac Pro - $6,200 (with 16 more GPU cores that specced up Studio and starts at 32gb RAM, BTW)

I would imagine that Apple has listened carefully to the fairly niche market for these things and have studios=uly given the market what it asked for - pci slots.

A fully decked out M2 Ultra Mac Studio (24‑core CPU, 76‑core GPU, 32‑core Neural Engine, 192GB unified memory, 8TB SSD storage) is £8,999 here.

A fully decked out M2 Ultra Mac Pro with the same spec as above is £11,999. You also get a Magic Keyboard and Mouse for that price.

So the real delta is more like £2,700 between the two. So basically a chassis that can take six PCIe Gen 4 slots, has an extra 10 GbE port, an extra HDMI port and 2 more Thunderbolt-4 ports.

Edited by Pheasant (Tue 06-Jun-23 11:06:47)

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Is it possible to expand the storage in the machine?

Yes. Either via PCIe or Thunderbolt.

So not much different to what other Macs are in that regard, no Sata or NVMe, it will be classed as external storage to Apple OS

I’m pretty sure that a PCIe drive is classed as internal storage.

SATA is slow; NVMe uses the PCIe interface. PCIe is the physical interface, NVMe is the communication protocol.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

So the real delta is more like £2,700 between the two. So basically a chassis that can take six PCIe Gen 4 slots, has an extra 10 GbE port, an extra HDMI port and 2 more Thunderbolt-4 ports.

And an extra USB-A port, that internal one that is intended for software licence dongles.

And also it has same option for a couple of internal drives that the Intel one has (it has the two 6GB SATA ports).

And presumably a lot quieter than the Ultra Studio under load.

You can also officially upgrade the SSD on the Mac Pro

https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MR393ZM/A/appl...

The price is eye-watering, £1,000 for a 2TB SSD. Only £820 more than the Samsung 990 PRO I bought recently.

Oh and don't forget the wheels...

Edited by andynormancx (Tue 06-Jun-23 15:47:25)

The Mac Pro has space for two 3.5 drives and has two SATA headers on the motherboard. You have to buy an extra bracket to add them though.

And you can upgrade the SSD, with an Apple supplied part, at vastly inflated prices.

Or you could put a card in one of the PCIe card slots with a bunch of NVMe drives on it.