[geerlingguy]

Yeah, raw RDMA is one thing, making sure other protocols can use it is another... hopefully Apple gets there, but right now SMB with RDMA is probably a tiny, tiny niche.

I do wonder what Apple's custom-built servers are running for networking. I wish they still made Mac Pro-level chassis specifically for better IO. Thunderbolt 5 is nice, but far inferior to a PCIe x16 slot (which can hit 400 Gbps networking) nowadays.

[xp84]

I'd suspect that (from Apple's perspective) any form of file sharing (other than iCloud) is now considered 'extremely niche.'

If they were focused on the needs of the kind of person who moves enough terabytes of files around to need this kind of speed, we'd see them still making either computers with slots, or first-party 25Gbps networking.

I'm not really trying to criticize them for it -- Tim Cook's bean counters clearly did the math and they're certainly free to optimize their Mac R&D spend for things that'll sell college students MacBook Neos and Airs, rather than worrying about the MKBHDs, Linus Sebastians and Jeff Geerlings of the world (this is just a list of people I've seen using extremely fast networking).

[tomjakubowski]

Might their professionals market segment (designers, video editors, 3d artists, and so on) still be using thunderbolt and LAN storage? This was the case ~7 years ago when I worked adjacent to these sorts of users. Video files are huge and expensive in time and money to transit with cloud storage providers.

[geerlingguy]

Apple used to even sell Xserve RAID and SAN software specifically to cater to the higher end users who needed fast networked storage (research, broadcast, media).

They kinda hit a standstill on the networking side as they moved to the trash can Mac, and I think that had killed momentum towards any high speed IO besides the Thunderbolt ports moving forward.

I was hopeful they'd keep the Mac Pro going into the M-series era but after one version... it's gone.

[kridsdale1]

I do 8k video editing on a Mac Studio. Files are often multiple TB (raw camera capture which I have to encode to ProRes). Moving this kind of bandwidth is absolutely what I have to do and Apples’ bad networking is a blocker I’ve discovered.