[rodgerd]

> memory-bandwidth-bottlenecked task.

The thing that's interesting for me around this is: I hate the on-die memory. I hate the idea of not being able to upgrade after your order, or a few years down the road. It has both practical problems and offends my inner nerd.

But.

This is a useful example of why there's value in it. It seems unlikely that you'd get as good a result with the traditional memory architecture.

[KennyBlanken]

People who need this sort of system aren't going to be looking to expand memory capacity in "a few years down the road." They'll be looking to purchase or lease the current model.

Also, if you really need more memory - buy the config with more memory and sell the old config. Resale on macs is usually superb.

I can't remember hearing a friend or gaming buddy say "I upgraded my ram." I haven't upgraded ram in any machine I've owned in twenty years and even before that, it was rare. There was never any point in putting that sort of money into an out of date CPU and memory architecture.

If you owned a trashcan Mac Pro and were a working creative, would you be upgrading its memory this month? Nope...

[FullyFunctional]

I contest this claim. I'm professional and I know I'm not alone in buying an iMac 5K with 16 GiB or less explicitly to later upgrade to much more with 3rd party (like Crucial) memory for vastly less than Apple asks.

That said, if the memory is fixed like on the Ultra, then sure, we'll buy what we need (and a bit more).

[greedo]

I think what people are really looking for is expandable memory so that you can buy a base version, and then add cheaper 3rd party RAM.

[simondotau]

I’m hoping that the Mac Pro introduces a two tier memory architecture so you can get the best of both worlds.