Mac Pro 2023 Teardown: It’s Grate!!!

[@AutumnRain]

finally, mac and cheese. now this is the type of tech journalism i like to see

[@fwheels7776]

Underrated comment. Kinda cheesy though. Gouda done better.

[@redstone0234]

iFixit is the only outlet to test a 7000$ cheese-grater that is Incidentally a computer 10/10

[@ShawAnthoni]

@@fwheels7776 I agree, he could’a done feta

[@ricenova8]

iMac and iCheese

[@gregoryzet]

rather apple and chees ;)

[@sanekibeko]

They really locked this one down. 7000 bucks for a cheese grater you can't upgrade.

[@shapelessed]

You know what's funnier? The CPU they put inside it has a measily 24 PCIe lanes... They have multiple x8 and x16 slots, but there are only two PCIe busses, one x16 and one x8 all split up through PCIe switches. For some context, I've got a 3rd gen Ryzen 7 PC and that thing has 24...

[@jjoonathan7178]

Ahhhhh! Why does apple tease us so? They have such brilliant mechanical design... to make it easy to do upgrades that you can't actually do! Ugh.

[@reboxtherapy]

@@jjoonathan7178 they want other companies to produce better full tower ARM alternatives

[@SeanTube2099]

I thought it had 7 PCI slots!?!?

[@quantuminfinity4260]

@@shapelessedIn practice it probably won’t matter to much most of the time, they are Gen 4 lanes and mostly for audio add ins, the only thing it supports that could use a lot of PCI-E bandwidth would be NVME drives in a configuration you would not likely use a MacPro for and instead an external NAS anyway. It’s mostly for audio and network cards that can easily manage full speed with a tiny handful of Gen 4 lanes.

[@ehrensto]

Such a huge PCB for what is basically just a glorified PCIe expansion case... It looks really really weird.

[@s8wc3]

The board design is insane, they would be using a board with a bunch of copper layers to fan out that BGA, which is expensive, ludicrously so at this size, and they're wasting most of it! You can tell the profit margin on this machine is out of this world, otherwise they wouldn't do that! They would have two boards, one with enough layers for the BGA and another with just enough for the rest, like they did with G5s.

[@FlannelAficionado]

My first reaction to the whole video didn't really come until Sam took the board out. I startled my dog yelling, "WHAT IS EVEN ON THE BOARD??? Maybe it's on the back?????? Nope."

[@t.s.4494]

@@s8wc3 I don't see why they'd need a lot of layers. The reason the package is so big is that Apple used package-on-package DRAM; there's eight DRAM packages hiding under that heatspreader. (If you want to see this for yourself, wccftech recently posted an article with pictures of a delidded M2 Ultra.) Unlike similar Intel and AMD big packages, none of the DRAM signals (and there are a lot of them! 1024 bits wide, IIRC) have to leave the package. Only IO does, and I'd be surprised if there's more than 64 lanes total SERDES. That shouldn't be much of a problem to route out.

[@winebartender6653]

​​@@t.s.4494ram is 64bit for ddr4/5 (though ddr5 has this split up into 2x32bit streams). And what you are describing is not how dram works at all from CPU to dram. The literal only difference here is that there isn't expandability. Sure, have soldered dram close to the SoC provides slightly lower latency, but beyond that, there is no difference (and certainly not anything a user or program would notice). This is blatantly done for $$$

[@dna9838]

With no possibility of discrete graphics, or drive bays to make use of (eg. optical drives).. really bizarre case that doesn’t make sense anymore.

[@EfremPanagiotou]

basically a big mac studio with expandabily but no upgradability no extra ram, no combatibility with GPUs and you can not upgrade the ssd because its firware locked.

[@davenz000]

For people who have add in cards for specialist tasks / audio / video. Robot overlord interfaces.

[@DrMacintosh]

You actually can upgrade the boot SSDs, Apple sells upgrade/replacement kits on their store. You can also obviously add storage on PCIe cards (M.2, SATA, etc.) or with the Pegasus HDD caddy.

[@williamburkholder769]

They didn't make this for PC lovers. Give up on that paradigm! The advantages of integration (All CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, and specialty processors for video, audio, and graphics integrated WITH shared memory onto the processor die) outweigh modularity for those components.) The fast solid state storage is, sadly, locked to the system, BUT you can add SSD cards to the PCI slots! This is basically a Mac Studio Ultra with slots that allow you to connect all sorts of outboard video editing gear, robotic devices, and other exotic components. It does not need graphics expandability... LOOK AT THE SPECS. 60 or 76 graphics cores should be plenty for the expected life of this machine.

[@cameronbosch1213]

​​@@williamburkholder769 Wow. What an Apple 🐑. Just because Apple is screwing over consumers doesn't mean you should bend over to their anti-consumer practices!

[@Pasi123]

@@williamburkholder769 The GPU isn't that fast when compared to what PCIe graphics cards are available today

[@saurikTT]

I would like to know how to repair the cheese after it has been scraped!

[@charlessmith5465]

Defrag the cheese.

[@justsomeguy5470]

Best you can do is recycle

[@harrisonkwa3371]

What was the point of a desktop tower and all that space if you can't add anything to it or upgrade it

[@jameswoll]

Did you literally get the board out with only disconnecting TWO cables!??

[@progenitor_amborella]

Cojita cheese is supposed to be crumbley! It also doesn’t really melt, it makes some fun food :)

[@EyesOfByes]

2:44 If Apple had bought Intel's Optane patents/IP they could have used that as persistent memory in some sort of dimm slots. If any company could have gotten full use of Optane's theoretical capabilities, it's Apple. Like, 6TB of persistent memory, all swapping would have happened on the Optane modules

[@XenonG]

Nah, they would integrate Optane onto the chip.

[@2nd_bloxx]

@@XenonG That is kinda not possible because of processes, but i agree, apple would not make it modular under any circumstances.

[@Watchandlearn91]

I'm a software engineer/architect and at my work we have actually used optane as memory in some very high memory workloads (mainly scientific computing) where it was just way too expensive to buy all memory. I agree it would have been cool if Apple had done that so we could have actually had swappable memory in addition to the soldered on RAM. I'm no expert but from my understanding when you add enough Optane and present it to the OS like RAM, the actual RAM becomes a sort of cache for it. Would have been really neat.

[@s0kulite]

@@Watchandlearn91 you'd expect that at this price, techs with enough budget would just take the hit and pay for the memory modules as well...

[@jlinwinter]

Seeing cheese grated on the cheese grater is the best part of this video!!!

[@MrFastFox666]

As a non Apple User who hasn't ever paid attention to the Mac Pro, this makes my brain hurt. Why would you buy this over their Mac Mini Studio (or whatever it's called) if you can't upgrade it anyways?

[@ConnorGriffinMusic]

It’s basically just for users who require pci-e expansion slots for specific hardware. Otherwise it’s the same as a Mac Studio.

[@bolttracks]

@@ConnorGriffinMusicthe irony being that a lot of cards like ProTools HDX and SDI Capture cards work perfectly fine in external Thunderbolt enclosures, especially since the Studio already has a ton of TB4 ports

[@Wilderhaus23]

The main reason would be dust accumulation and easy access to internals. The Mac Studio will require a full disassembly every time you decide to clean the heat sink and psu from dust.

[@clementcardonnel3219]

@z37d4 I've heard NVME expansion was feasible but limited in bandwidth. I'd encourage you to check that out before making a purchase. Even this use case may not be applicable

[@BadMannerKorea]

Because it's an aesthetic case with upgradability for very specific uses.

[@jotabe00]

It became more cheese grater and less computer.

[@eggnorman]

What ruffles me the wrong way is the lack of support for MPX. I know we're moving away from add-in GPUs, but there are workloads that could still benefit from them in addition to the integrated GPU cluster on the M2 Ultra. Not to mention that an MPX module doesn't even have to be a GPU.

[@ajkandy]

Well...MPX was kind of a weird hack Apple did to get around the limitations of PCIe 3.0, using an additional connector to add lanes and carry video output over the Thunderbolt bus. Given that you can't use MPX in any other computer, and the number of computers with it was a relatively tiny fraction of a minority to begin with, it's not like manufacturers were lining up to support it. If Intel had had support for 4.0 at the time, Apple might have made some very different design decisions. That said, yeah, it'd be cool to be able to have some sort of M2 blade server type machine, or a derivative GPU-only chip, that could run in concert with a host Mac the same way they used to with Xgrid.

[@nmotschidontwannagivemyrea8932]

In what world are we moving away from add-in GPUs?

[@SergioEduP]

@@nmotschidontwannagivemyrea8932 In the "Apple" world they are

[@berbudy]

Thank God someone did this

[@danielmiecz909]

It’s worse it’s in a case that’s made to be upgraded but u can’t actually upgrade anything

[@SpikeTiger]

that cheese test really seals the deal!

[@goobfilmcast4239]

Who knows what Apple will or won't "allow" on PCIe or other slots and connectors. The real problem seems to be bottlenecking. Unified memory helps overcomes those disadvantages but adding options to "offload" 3D rendering/Ray Tracing and other data intensive operations on specialty PCIe cards may be possible...hey, it CUDA happen in the future 🙂

[@Matthew-yc6nx]

Hehe very punny! Unfortunately it's unlikely given Apple and Nvidia's beef

[@QUANTUMJOKER]

It's a shame that unified memory, while very fast and efficient, can be a bit of a disadvantage if you have a small amount, or not enough for your workload. My M1 Mac Mini has 8 GB of unified memory, and engages in near-constant swap activity even with light-to-medium usage. My 2012 MacBook Pro has 16 GB of discrete RAM, my 2010 Mac Pro has 48 GB and my 2013 Mac Pro has a whopping 64 GB; while these computers use older, slower DDR3 memory, they have so much memory that the CPU and MacOS can take all they need with plenty to spare, and so almost never engage in swap activity.

[@DVincentW]

Grating experience.

[@wovkonstudios]

Finally, i have been waiting for a.vodep like this 😂

[@KangJangkrik]

Oh you forgot to grate coconut with it, I tried and the result is quite mindblowing (scratches)

[@barmaley_freeman]

finally we found a use for the new MacPro 2023

[@freddiegagging6116]

Sam - Love the cheeses! It did take a bit of time for the older grater SSD options to show up, at ultra high costs! 3:56

[@john_hind]

Huge scope for third party enclosure kits here. The Pro box should fit an entire Mac Mini or even Studio inside and the Microchip PCI chip is presumably available to all. The difference Studio to Pro in cost is huge and in performance small to non-existent. Combine that with the ability to add flash storage without the Apple Tax and there is a whole lot of scope for making a nice profit whilst saving the consumer pots of cash!

[@Pyracantic]

I love this classy sarcasm that absolutely shits down apples throat 😂

[@himynameisryan]

Honestly, as both an apple and cheese fan, i can confirm i love this video

[@__alves_]

Last part is why I like u guys!

[@KashifNawaz85]

So 4000 dollars just for a few PCIE slots. Typical Apple.

[@akeem2983]

Despite obvious limitations (that I hope are temporary), it's interesting to see a powerful ARM-based PC in a package similar to regular PC in ITX case

[@findefuchs]

I´m looking forward for Apple Vision Pro teardown!!!👀👀👀

[@Entamut]

Apparently some products get repairability score some don’t. I wonder why…

[@accordinglyryan]

No idea who this is for. A $3,000 premium over the Mac Studio which has identical hardware for...some PCIe slots you can't use with 90% of PCIe devices? What's the point?

[@redstone0234]

actullay i think is for specialised PCIe Cards (Like a Video Mixer Controller Board)

[@AlvaroAvalos]

Wow, Someone actually did it.

[@MrGulliver]

Hey look at me, im different!!! Hello radiator!

[@jamesdriver0317]

I heard that Apple sells Mac Pro SSD upgrades/replacements so it’s not like the Mac Studio.

[@lachlanlau]

2:49 also SSD pairing.. See iBoff's video on it.

[@BaconFaceMcGee]

Fancier than anything I’ll ever own 😩.

[@SuperSmashDolls]

I was personally hoping Apple would just give us like 16 DIMM slots on the back of the Pro lol

[@theradbagel]

Only if this thing can game. It would be game changing

[@JSS75]

I can’t buy a Mac again until I can upgrade it, that goes for laptops too. Have a nice zephyrus that I’ve already upgraded the ram on and can do the ssd easily too.

[@marcosalano7769]

Using a 7k computer to grate cheese is humanity in its peak. I love it.

[@TechDove]

If it's non upgradable and the Mac studio is a thing, why does this exist with all of that empty space?

[@Jan-xf8sk]

It's s just a STOPGAP product. Initially they planned to have an M2 "Extreme" card there (basically 2 fused M2 Ultras) and a secondary interface/hardware layer for DDR5 memory (in addition to the soldered memory on the SOC. But it took significant R&D and resources for them to hit timelines. Heck, even people inside Apple don't even want to release this thing. Tim Cook only greenlit this thing to "spiritually" complete their transition from Intel.

[@Longlius]

It basically just exists because they want to completely retire the Intel Macs but some studios that use macs need PCIe slots for things like dedicated soundcards etc and so they need *something* that can fit that niche.

[@SignedAdam]

funny, I did crack a smile

[@Cathay3520]

"mom can we have mac and cheese?" "we already have mac and cheese at home" mac and cheese at home:

[@rubenoskam]

🤓🤓🤓🤓

[@mintzbuck]

Oh neat, there seems to be no power connectors on the thing, so if you do manage to find expansion cards that work with them, they have to be powered over the PCI bus. Or maybe there is one.

[@xluumu]

Yes, there are power connectors available.

[@ethann_browne]

​@@xluumuprobably $99.95 extra...

[@rexlpo]

The end of clip is so so funny. Good one guys.

[@code_circuit]

love these vids

[@Collin_J]

Grate overview!

[@isaiahaguilar5977]

You are doing the Lords work

[@javey742]

That's GRATE!!! For a $7000 Grater LMAO 🤣🤣🤣

[@SP4CEBAR]

This is of the most interesting unboxing videos

[@6891s]

that's a "big mac", sadly it's not that "grate" for "upgratability" but at least it nice to have a 7000$ "cheese grater" for a luxurious "mac and cheese"

[@Chard9463]

Deserves an automatic 0/10 for parts pairing, software locks and very limited upgradability.

thats just what i wanted to see since it was anounced

[@tannenguitar]

You really made my day :) Very nice video :)

[@UntrackedEndorphins]

The non upgradable RAM I can understand, its integrated in the processor. But the non upgradeable storage and locked down PCI-E? YIKES

[@zoruaboy]

The storage is actually upgradable. Apple sells the internal storage upgrade kits on their website. Only thing is, since Apple Silicon is kinda peculiar, you can only use Apple’s SSD’s, and you need to have a second Mac to reprogram the SSDs and get the Mac Pro to use them. Security, Device Integrity, all that… At least it isn’t totally locked down though

[@youtube_bot839]

​@@zoruaboyApple silicon is like any other ARM soc. Apple just likes making money and hating their costumers so they lock their ssd with proprietary firmware which is totally unnecessary.

[@Azreal34]

So the most important question: Who had to clean the case!?

[@shivarakesh5541]

Good video

[@jailsonsilva8537]

This is a Mac Studio with some PCI slots that the user never will use.

[@blinkenlightsmagic]

Just the right amount of cheesy - excellent! 😄 Thanks for the great review!

[@Wilderhaus23]

There is room for two heat sinks on a duo cpu arm motherboard, that would have been great!

[@djtomoy]

Haha, Grate!! I get it! 😎

[@pepotitti]

GRATE😂

[@TJ-vh2ps]

Came for the cheese, stayed for the whine. ;^)

[@-fazik-3713]

Mac&Cheese Grate! :D

[@GaryBeltz]

Those are some big fans and a huge heatsink holy smokes

[@aziva3350]

that was Grate

[@benskoppel4969]

Sorry, is there a Geekbench score for the Parmesan grate?

[@BEDbMAK1]

For 7k I would buy parts and build a WAY MORE powerful pc. And if i need macos i just go for hackintosh. But honestly i would choose Linux or Windows anyways.

[@Tjoeb123]

You also can't upgrade the SSD that comes with it.

[@diefisem]

Hello, I wanted to know from you if there are substantial differences between 1Gb and 2Gb's storage of the Mac Pro? Can you tell me which one is better ... and If buying the Mac Pro with 1Gb of storage is a loss in performance... I'm referring to the original Apple storages, the ones you choose during the purchase. Grazie Maurizio 🙂

[@bolttracks]

I was really really hoping for CPU cards like the 2009 Mac Pro… it seemed so feasible

[@MrGamelover23]

Oh my God they're actually using it as a cheese grater 😂😂😂 I mean what else are you supposed to do?

[@digitalplayland]

Wow!!! Amazingzing! I'll buy two. I have a lot of cheese.

[@IEJ7654321]

Reason why a lot of modular parts were removed because of the way apple silicon works. I would say unless you need a lot of pcie expansion, go with the mac studio.

[@junseongpark9460]

Best Cheese grinder

[@ztechrepairs]

When I have desktop/laptop repairs one of the main culprits is faulty memory. What makes apples soldered on memory so special to evade that outcome. Genuinely curious.

[@zoruaboy]

It’s integrated into the chip itself. The M2 Ultra is an SoC, so its all in one package vs RAM being separate from the CPU, GPU, etc.. It’s much less likely to fail.

[@ztechrepairs]

@@zoruaboy I really appreciate that thank you. Just taught me something new for the day

[@PvtAnonymous]

@@zoruaboy "it's much less likely to fail" uhhh where did you get this from? It has the exact same chance of failure as every other RAM module. Just because it's integrated into an SoC and shared between CPU and GPU doesn't make it more robust somehow. Thermal cycling, electromagnetic interference and overvoltage/-current can kill RAM, especially over time. Yes it can die, but it's not really a novelty in the Apple world, since RAM has been soldered on for around 8 years in many Mac products now.

[@zoruaboy]

@@PvtAnonymous the likely hood of all that happening is a lot less when it’s integrated, literally by nature of being integrated, vs in separate pieces. Good example would be how the T2 chip could sometimes crap out or the touchbar would freeze on an Intel MBP, but since it’s now all integrated, all being handled by the same package, there’s less chance of failure because there’s just less parts to worry about.

[@Роман-д1й1ш]

@@zoruaboy ram chips is not "integrated", they simply soldered near the cpu. It is still 2 separate chips.

[@Fincher123]

I like to have more Infos about the Fans! I mean they have compared to PC Fans overwhelming big hubs, but how great are they? Loudness, Air Pressure and so on.... Could i get one as spare and use them on my PWM Controller?

[@Noah-Lach]

Details are pretty sparse, unfortunately. They look to be 140mm fans based on the the product dimensions and some pixel peeping. An Apple interview from 2019 also seems to imply that they're optimized for airflow rather than static pressure, as one of the engineers called out the lack of dust filtration and wide heatsink fins as a way to reduce fan noise.

[@Fincher123]

@@Noah-Lach Hey Thank you for this nice Information! I mostly like the Fan outer side of the Blades. That this is a wall which goes over the outside ob the Thing that sourrounds the whole Fan. Sorry iam lost for words kinda ;) Maybe the channel: Major Hardware gets sometimes such a fan to print with better Blades.

[@Noah-Lach]

@@Fincher123 You mean the shroud attached the the fan blades? I think that's a really neat idea for reducing turbulence. I know Noctua's Sterox fans are so quiet in part because the tolerance between the fan blades and the outer casing is extremely small. I guess Apple took another approach by just eliminating that "tolerance" altogether. Like you, I'm curious to know more about this interesting rather unique design and why it isn't been copied by any other fan manufacturers.

[@bakutools]

the parts to peeling cheese. that's funny!

[@alfredbaxter1061]

It look nice and upgradeble

[@Tominatort69420]

Having no user upgradeable RAM on a machine like this should be considered a felony in my opinion.

[@mal7916]

Why would you want to upgrade it? Apple's RAM setup is far better than any PC setup out there, because: It's rated at 800GB/s (A gaming PC with DDR4 is rated at 76GB/s) It's shared between the GPU and CPU, thus removing all the redundant cycles. It's very close to the chip. Since the latency is very low and the speed is high, the RAM controller in the chip treats it more like an L4 cache.

[@YoshikoJanai]

@@mal7916The ”Poverty Spec” Pro is $7k for 64 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD. Non-upgradable RAM means you cannot increase that number after the fact. On top of that, upgrades to 128 and 192 Gb are $800 and $1600 respectively. For your DDR4 comparison, you can get full mid-range gaming computers for the price of those upgrades alone.

[@davidgrisez]

That is what you get with an integrated system on a chip architecture.

[@Tominatort69420]

@@mal7916 What if the RAM fails? You would either need to have micro-soldering equipment or waste another $10K on another MAC Pro.

[@amirpourghoureiyan1637]

@@mal7916you can match the bandwidth with more DIMMs, for how much this costs it should’ve been included - the RAM price would be a fraction of the cost to integrate in this glorified riser board. Ampere has been making ARM workstations for a lot longer and proved that it’s not a problem to have upgradeable RAM with ARM.

[@Jan-xf8sk]

It's s just a STOPGAP product. Initially they planned to have an M2 "Extreme" card there (basically 2 fused M2 Ultras) and a secondary interface/hardware layer for DDR5 memory (in addition to the soldered memory on the SOC.) But it took significant R&D and resources for them to hit timelines. Heck, even people inside Apple don't even want to release this thing. Tim Cook only greenlit this thing to "spiritually" complete their transition from Intel. Not only they removed the compatibility for MPX modules, but also didn't even bother to put ECC memory on the unified memory and gimped a plenty of upgradeability, save for those PCIe slots (heck they even advertised it on 2019 version) so, their $3000 asking price for the PCIe slots is NOT WORTH IT. Get a M2 Ultra Mac Studio and PCIe-Thunderbolt enclosures instead.

[@montex66]

Rather than Apple dumping all that engineering effort into an Extreme chip, I see them starting to sell "Compute Units" that are full Apple Silicon Macs on a PCI card you can add to the Mac Pro to boost performance. There's room to add at least 3 Compute Units for a total of 4 Ultra macs in one tower.

[@Jan-xf8sk]

@@montex66 never going to happen. Selling "compute" units would make them less money than buying a new unit outright

[@frokfrdk]

That board is soooo empty and sparse

[@jondonnelly3]

It's like HiFi gear that amstrad used to make in the 80s. Big box noting inside it but air.

[@Denuwu]

So basically its a big macbook without a display overinflated price tag Rip pros that need more than 192gb of ram

[@A_d_e_k]

They went out of their way to give you as little as possible for as much money as possible. This is brutal.

[@davidmurakami164]

No upgradeable RAM (and capped at 192GB) and no GPUs = DOA

[@alanl9497]

Haha this is so tempting to do, I bet 😂😂

[@Guuzaka]

3:08 This is the part of the video where things turn cheesy. 🧀

[@NerdOrange]

What Surprises me for a company that popularized personal computers Apple really takes the personal out of personal computer

[@enricorpg]

I wonder if anyone grated some cheese on it, brought it back to the Apple Store, and says I changed my mind can I get my money back.

[@kupikichuvava1661]

Apple love these kind of cheese grading videos

[@aliancemd]

They lockdown upgrades because it works, suckers will always buy a completely new device given good enough marketing

[@GalenlevyPhoto]

Too bad it’s not worth the $7000, imo.

[@TheBroz]

It’s cheaper than the last Pro and that was worth it for many.

[@youtube_bot839]

​@@TheBrozcause it actually was a PC with upgradable ram and gpus.

[@jiltedarts]

So effectively you are paying 7000 usd to borrow a mac pro from apple...

[@mueffe1357]

What is the point doing this if you don't make cheese sandwich? When Apple gives use 7000 bucks cheese grater, you make cheese sandwich.

[@Hirens.]

Keep up the good work!

[@samharry7474]

This presenter is awesome!

[@AlfaRomeo128]

will you do a rack version of mac pro, ? PLEASE!!

[@divital]

looks like its going to take a while, to clean them holes around the grating grid.

[@ashrafkarjiker6888]

You guys need to get service manuals from the manufacturers to help with troubleshooting

[@Pd69bq]

after the big failure of the trash can Mac Pro, Apple promised that the cheese grater Mac Pro would have more expandability and upgradability. However, once again, we have no upgradability on the new Mac Pro, and this time Apple has even adopted a completely different processor architecture.

[@c5ris620]

Trash can has lasted me 10 years doing professional music.This one should be the same. Is that not what they're supposed to do?