[lukeh]

Still rocking a 2019 (Intel) Mac Pro here, all slots filled with various Pro Tools and UAD DSP cards, SSD, GPU, etc. I'm planning to get as much mileage out of it as I can. I'm sure a Studio would be more performant, but the Thunderbolt to PCIe chassis are not cheap.

[alifeinbinary]

i’m in the same boat. I bought mine back in 2021 and honestly I don’t regret my decision. It’s my main software development of music production computer plus every Sunday night I get to play counterstrike with the boys by dual booting into Windows. I’m able to service repair and upgrade it myself and one day when I’m ready to move on I’ll use it as my home server. The crazy thing is that my next upgrade will be going back to a MacBook Pro most likely because the thunderbolt connectivity will be able to handle the Blackmagic 4 camera broadcast capture card and NVME PCIe storage card that are in my Mac Pro right now through some external enclosure.

The only real drawback that I’ve experienced with the Mac Pro has been the lack of support for large language models on the AMD GPU due to Apple's lacklustre metal drivers but I’ve been working with a couple of other developers to port a MoltenVK translation layer to Ollama that enables LLM’s on the GPU. We’re trying to get it on the main branch since testing has gone well.

One thing a lot of commenters in this thread are overlooking is that this is the death nell for repairable and upgradable computing for Mac, which is super disappointing.

[NetMageSCW]

Studios are repairable. Upgrading is being deprecated however, and I’m not sure that’s bad for Apple. It may not be bad for the end user either - it feels like external TB/USB peripherals might have a longer life transferred between computers than an internal PCIe version - and a larger market as they will work with any Mac.