Mac Pro 2023 Teardown: It’s Grate!!!

Like a fine wine, the Mac Pro has aged nicely, and pairs well with cheese-more on that soon. But this year’s recycled aluminum tower also suffers from a pairing we hate: parts pairing. The $7,000 question is: is the rest still modular?
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Chapters
00:00 iFixit's 2023 Mac Pro Teardown
00:20 Opening the 2023 Mac Pro
00:41 The 2023 Mac Pro's SSD slots
00:54 Comparing the 2023 Mac Pro's SSD to the M2 Mac Studio's
01:07 Removing the 2023 Mac Pro's Expansion Cards
01:26 Removing the 2023 Mac Pro's Power Supply
01:35 Removing the 2023 Mac Pro's Fan
01:47 Removing the 2023 Mac Pro's Heat Sink
02:10 Removing the 2023 Mac Pro's Logic Board
02:49 How well does the 2023 Mac Pro grate cheese?
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[@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.

[@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

[@shawnsyville]

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

[@ricenova8]

iMac and iCheese

[@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 $$$

[@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

[@Elastane]

It's a whole lotta nothing :/ It's actually impressive how much... nothing... they managed to pack into honestly...10/10 for the cheese grating though ♥

[@crbielert]

Yeah, at least the dual G5 mac pros were a solid box of awesome for the price.

[@jameswoll]

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

[@harrisonkwa3371]

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

[@progenitor_amborella]

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

[@jlinwinter]

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

[@Bimboms]

I remember seeing these as a kid at Art Center College of Design. When I was told the price I thought, "I'll never own one of those." and I never have. hehe

[@ethann_browne]

Back when you could buy the base model, throw 2 Xeons and a Quadro in it, upgrade the RAM and add in a Raid 0 array of HDDs. 😉

[@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...

[@danielmiecz909]

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

[@jotabe00]

It became more cheese grater and less computer.

[@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

[@jvnelvlam00n]

For a user like me where the IO on the Mac Studio can seem limiting plus wanting more local storage on the machine itself (yes you can just throw in nvme cards)

[@jvnelvlam00n]

@@bolttracksand those take up space that this desktop can

[@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.

[@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

[@KangJangkrik]

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

[@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

[@wovkonstudios]

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

[@SpikeTiger]

that cheese test really seals the deal!

[@lachlanlau]

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

[@Pyracantic]

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

[@berbudy]

Thank God someone did this

[@DVincentW]

Grating experience.

[@404ErrorNot_Found]

love these vids

[@pepotitti]

GRATE😂

[@__alves_]

Last part is why I like u guys!

[@blinkenlightsmagic]

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

[@tannenguitar]

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

[@rexlpo]

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

[@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

[@KashifNawaz85]

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

[@jvnelvlam00n]

Welcome to the workstation market buddy… it isnt about being affordable

[@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.

[@Hirens.]

Keep up the good work!

[@Entamut]

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

[@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.

[@himynameisryan]

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

[@bakutools]

the parts to peeling cheese. that's funny!

[@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!

[@SP4CEBAR]

This is of the most interesting unboxing videos

[@benskoppel4969]

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

[@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 🙂

[@SignedAdam]

funny, I did crack a smile

[@barmaley_freeman]

finally we found a use for the new MacPro 2023

[@bolttracks]

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

[@cwhiten]

Made me laugh so hard 🤣🤣🤣 Mac and cheese hahahaha

[@Denuwu]

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

thats just what i wanted to see since it was anounced

[@Tjoeb123]

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

[@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.

[@AlfaRomeo128]

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

[@SuperSmashDolls]

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

[@MrGulliver]

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

[@Felix_EN]

What happened to being able to upgrade the old mac pro? I was expecting a platform upgrade, swop out the motherboard and bam you have apple silicone. Wtf

[@-fazik-3713]

Mac&Cheese Grate! :D

[@alanl9497]

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

[@GaryBeltz]

Those are some big fans and a huge heatsink holy smokes

[@idzkk]

Mac studio in old mac pro case is possible Mod one can try

[@jailsonsilva8537]

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

[@Collin_J]

Grate overview!

[@jamesdriver0317]

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

[@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.

[@shivarakesh5541]

Good video

[@isaiahaguilar5977]

You are doing the Lords work

[@Cathay3520]

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

[@rubenoskam]

🤓🤓🤓🤓

[@javey742]

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

[@findefuchs]

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

[@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.

[@Comander555666]

trolollolol finally a video that gets my sentiments over such products

[@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...

[@michaellurie9138]

What about those 2 SATA connectors?

[@theradbagel]

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

[@divital]

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

[@Wilderhaus23]

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

[@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.

[@BaconFaceMcGee]

Fancier than anything I’ll ever own 😩.

[@TJ-vh2ps]

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

[@frokfrdk]

That board is soooo empty and sparse

[@jondonnelly4831]

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

[@Azreal34]

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

[@marcosalano7769]

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

[@davidmurakami164]

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

[@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.

[@user-lh4in4rx1f]

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

[@PlutoTheSynth]

Ok but how do tou get the cheese out of the holes

[@NerdOrange]

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

[@MrGamelover23]

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

[@paragonmuffin]

💀 🧀

[@AlvaroAvalos]

Wow, Someone actually did it.

[@alfredbaxter1061]

It look nice and upgradeble

[@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.

[@imronibon867]

That's crazy

[@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.

[@hachanabe]

I bought one like that for my wife to prepare the cheese. However there is a design issue it is not too sharp. when plugged in power it make a bit of noie and heat up of some times What is the use of the power cable ? The cheese get stuck inside difficult to tilt it to get the cheese out Heavy big and take space in the kitchen Too expensive and almost completely useless. the manual is weird, no explanation about how to use with cheese I'm returning it to Walmart and ask for reimbursement, I will buy a computer for my family instead.

[@digitalplayland]

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

[@itsjinxed01]

may I ask if unified memory is mandatory for the Apple chip? Like what would happen if Apple engineers separate the memory from the soc?

[@jvnelvlam00n]

It would be much slower… look at memory speeds vs a standard gpu vs a nvidia volta card to see what this difference can look like.

[@danielsgrunge]

It is mandatory It's a HUGE part of what makes it so fast

[@DGao-zz5vq]

Unified memory and onboard memory are two different, unrelated concepts. Unified memory means that all compute IP blocks (CPU, GPU, cryptographic accelerator, etc.) on the system share a single memory pool. Doing things this way makes it unnecessary to move data around between different memory pools. e.g. if you want to load a piece of texture onto a PCIe GPU, the CPU will have to first load it from disk to system memory, then send it from system memory to VRAM through the PCIe bus. In a unified setup, the CPU fetches the data from disk, loads it into system memory, and the data is now directly accessible to the GPU. It’s far from a novel concept, Intel’s iGPU has been doing it for years. In fact, they not only shares the system memory with the cores, but also the on-ring cache (L3 in CPU cache hierarchy). There are technical reasons why Apple went with soldered memory on ASi Macs, however none of these apply to the Mac Pro. 1. LPDDR (which doesn’t have a standardized connector and has to be soldered) consumes less power than the corresponding DDR standard (which does have a industry standard slot). This allows the system to draw less power at idle and improve battery life. I’m pretty sure the Mac Pro has a battery life of 0 minutes. 2. Comparing against the typical x86-64 PC system, the ASi system memory has a significantly more powerful GPU to feed. This poses a substantial memory bandwidth requirement. One DDR SO-DIMM is 64-bit wide, and takes up a substantial amount of space in a laptop. M1/M2 Max has a 512-bit memory bus, and Apple would’ve needed 8 SO-DIMMs if they were required to implement it using standard modular interfaces. As you can see, the ASi Mac Pro board has a lot of unused space.

[@itsjinxed01]

@@DGao-zz5vq thanks mate! That clarified my doubt!

[@Longlius]

Unified memory doesn't necessarily have to be soldered on, but current M-series SoCs only support LPDDR5 which is always soldered on (the difference between it and regular DDR5 is that it uses less power to reach DDR5 performance at the cost of, well, being soldered on). There were rumors that Apple was experimenting with adding a hypothetical M2 Extreme to the lineup which would support additional DDR5 DIMMs in addition to the on-chip pool of LPDDR5 but that the project never materialized. Maybe when the M3 Mac Pro comes out, we'll see more user-expandability (although this is Apple so temper your expectations).

[@aziva3350]

that was Grate

[@TominatorT-]

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.

[@TominatorT-]

@@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.

[@thefynn]

Nice teardown! One of the most impressive Computer builds, sadly the missing GPU and RAM modularity is a huge downgrade. I would like this kind of module design in the PC world, the ATX PC world so so far behind. And it would like to see a Mac Pro with real modularity again. But the cheese is the most important by far.

[@littlebuch]

Is this satire? PCs aren't modular?

[@PvtAnonymous]

@@littlebuch he never said modular, he said "module design" which is a completely different thing. And I totally get what he means, I don't know how one can misunderstand that.

[@littlebuch]

@@PvtAnonymous The two words are synonyms. You "completely" get it. I'm sure...

[@PvtAnonymous]

@@littlebuch ok, so which modules do exist in the ATX standard smartpants? I only know of parts.

[@littlebuch]

@@PvtAnonymous Gpus, ram, psus, ssd, hdd, drives of various types? Everything? Literally everything exists in an "ATX standard".

[@rorisxng]

Teardown the Pixel Tablet next please

[@itsandyfs]

This was a fantastic review of it, haha, what a weird product for what new Apple Silicon is meant to be