I spent $8K on the M2 Ultra Mac Pro even though it's DUMB

if you had come up to me four years ago when Apple introduced the redesigned Mac Pro and you said to me Luke there's going to be a new Mac Pro with the same design in about four years time and that thing is going to be more powerful in its cheapest configuration than that Mac Pro is at its most expensive 50 000 configuration and it's gonna cost one-fifth the price I would have said holy cow that's amazing and if you had then said that hey when that Mac Pro comes out you're gonna think it's dumb I would have thought that you were insane and yet here we are this new Mac Pro cost me eight thousand dollars and today we are gonna find out why and probably upset a couple of Apple sheep but that's okay with me this box is crazy man look at this you got some velcro straps on the side at the very least for your eight thousand dollars you're gonna get a nice box wow honestly yeah I'm a simp but I love this unboxing experience that is so nice I mean look at this thing you can't say that Apple doesn't nail the presentation let's take a look at the keyboard around the other side we should have our Mouse and our power cord classic Magic Mouse so I guess we just pull it straight up and out oh that is a big big boy oh my goodness I never realized that you get this kind of a booklet oh those are some big Apple stickers and there's our new M2 Ultra chip I love the fact that this isn't even like an instruction manual this is just like the images that they put on the website there's the wheels didn't get those so this is like Christmas morning except that I spent all the money and it was dramatically too expensive oh that is that is satisfaction right there I've always wanted to do this I never had the previous generation Mac Pro oh yeah look I think that this is a fundamentally silly product and that it probably shouldn't exist but that doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to appreciate good design when I see it I mean look at the quality of every single piece look at the beveled edges on these Thunderbolt ports and look at the way that the power button uses these Pogo pins to connect to the top i o board that is ridiculously nice but also look how empty it is in there there's like nothing happening in this thing look at all this empty PCB empty PCB we do have six empty pcie slots and then there's two more that have these stock i o cards that's going to give you a huge old bunch of Thunderbolt ports hdmis USBS that's great but my goodness you look at this thing from afar it it looks like a machine that is not being utilized to its fullest potential at all but where it gets funny to me is around the back here so these panels used to cover up your upgradable memory up to one and a half terabytes but if we unlock them now all you'll find is your upgradeable storage and some heat sinks and as far as upgradability that is it that port is all we get so it seems like the days of an upgradable Mac Pro are behind us once and for all and so you might be wondering why else would you buy one well before we find out a quick word from today's video sponsor today's video is sponsored by clearvpn the VPN that I love to use clearvpn comes from macpaw the creators of cleanmymacx who have been a long time supporter of the channel they've reworked clearvpn for a streamlined user-friendly experience that emphasizes the most important features it uses top tier encryption and employs a strict no log policy so no online activity or personal info is collected or stored see clearvpn believes that your data is private so they they offer a secure browsing module for free to all users clearvpn is the VPN that you can trust and you'll love using so whether you want to secure your browsing experience change your location or access streaming services from anywhere in the world clearvpn has painless setup in seconds it is so simple to use it is really really fast and with plans starting at just three dollars and fifty cents it's affordable as well and you can use promo code El miani with the link in the description below to save even more get three whole months for just 10 bucks so why wait check out clearvpn today okay so let's talk performance here obviously the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro are now spec Brothers they have the exact same configurations with a three thousand dollar difference between them so you might be wondering well is this Mac Pro with its larger power supply and much much more beefy case and cooler gonna perform any better well in cinebench R23 we found an incredible 28 755 that's 25 points higher than the equivalent Max studio pretty impressive and that GPU is no slouch either and gfx bench Manhattan 3.1 off screen we found a whopping four FPS increase 1603 to 167. and while that's obviously a significant Improvement I did notice that in the Aztec High tier off screen test we were one FPS shy at 331 but in 3dmark Wildlife extreme an impressive showing 46 661 compared to 45 172 that is 1.9 percent faster that's I mean that's mind-boggling that's worth three thousand dollars I'd say okay no but in all seriousness the synthetic benchmarks as you would expect are basically identical no one is ever ever ever going to notice something like that and in fact the only thing that I did notice is that this Mac Pro did not perform better in The Thermals Department that's the one area where I expected this thing to win and it didn't paradoxically when running cinebench I noticed that the temperatures on the Mac Pro were actually a few degrees hotter on average than the Max studio how is that even possible you might ask well it's actually pretty simple because this gigantic chassis is designed to cool a device that has multiple components there's air channels for cooling the ram not needed anymore there's air channels for cooling the gpus and all these pcie slots and in fact the heatsink that was designed just to cool the CPU in the Intel machine is now Cooling everything in this machine because the entire SOC is just right up top in the front here now obviously that's sufficient because temperatures never even broke 70 degrees Celsius with idle fan speed so it's not at all to say that this thing is thermally inferior they're both excellent It's just that this has a lot more unnecessary cooling overhead than the Max studio which was designed to cool this apple silicon SOC but let's get back to Performance here because I did find a couple of areas where this was inexplicably faster in my tried and true Final Cut test for example the render revealed a saving of just eight seconds compared to the M2 Ultra with a 15 minute 4K project however in the export of that same project I saved 27 seconds now that's hardly a massive difference when compared to the M2 Max but 27 seconds is a noticeable Improvement so that definitely caught me off guard I was also caught off guard running the blender class from CPU tests which revealed 2 minutes and 48 seconds compared to 3 minutes and 3 seconds again no explanation for why it was I mean I'm not going to say that much faster but a little bit faster and especially confounding is the fact that when I ran the GPU test it was exactly the same and when I ran the blender BMW GPU test it was also the same and finally in Rise of the Tomb Raider well we gained two FPS so it seems like the GPU is really not giving us a whole lot to go by here but strangely in Final Cut Pro and blender we are seeing some performance gains in certain applications now this is minor enough and isolated enough that it is by no means sufficient to recommend the Mac Pro over the Mac Studio and this is where the problems begin for the new Mac Pro and that is that it fundamentally is a product that doesn't really have any purpose there is no justifiable reason for this product to exist and I know already that there's going to be comments down below saying hey Luke you are an idiot you don't know what you're talking about this product isn't meant for you in all of the reviews and articles about this device they've basically said something to the effect of if this device is for you you'll know it that means a very very tiny number of people Maybe audio Engineers who want to be able to put in some sound cards or people that want to just load the thing up with storage or some other use case that I'm too stupid to know anything about it's kind of ironic to me that is a very unapple thing to do and this is a very un Mac Pro Mac Pro I mean look at this Mac Pro here this is I think the gold standard and while this was never really meant to be a mass-market machine that anyone and everyone could use that's kind of what it became and the reason is that they could be expanded and and upgraded the CPU the ram the hard drive storage the SSD storage and the graphics card are all different than what this machine shipped with and that meant that when it was new it could be used in a high-end scenario after a couple of years they became more accessible to the general population there's a whole community of people that hot rod and mod these things this was a fantastic machine and that's part of the reason why Pros revolted when Apple came out with this in 2013 it removed all of that expandability and upgrade ability that this guy had and the ironic thing is that this is infinitely more upgradable than the new Mac Pro what the heck are you talking about that sounds insane but it's true this failed because it wasn't a real Mac Pro compared to this but it still has an upgradable CPU upgradable RAM and upgradable storage heck you can even upgrade the graphics which I have done although you have to stay within the three Graphics options that were available so this thing failed for being Limited in its upgrade potential and its future proofing potential and for being expensive and yet this comes out where the only thing that you can upgrade is the storage with Apple's very expensive proprietary modules don't even think about doing the Ram or the CPU or the GPU or adding additional gpus nothing forget about it the only thing that you can do with this Mac Pro is expand it and that comes at a tremendous tremendous price premium spec for spec the new Mac Pro is three thousand dollars more than the Max studio and look at them next to each other this is a device that was designed for Apple silicon this is a device that was adapted it's a shame right this chassis the Mac Pro Design from 2019 is absolutely gorgeous and in an Intel World it made a ton of sense the problem was it was just too late the new cheese grater Mac Pro came out just six months before Apple announced the transition to Apple silicon so as soon as this thing was available the writing was on the wall this is not something that Apple was interested in supporting all that much longer and a lot of that is just a sign of the times when the 2009 and 2010 cheese grater Mac Pros came out intel was at pretty much the top of its game and they weren't really innovating all that much and so those devices were able to be used for five six seven eight years and still be competitive with the newest Apple products but we're now in a landscape where the least expensive configuration of the Mac Pro can eclipse the performance of a forty thousand dollar one from just four years ago but as crazy as that is it's not good enough to overcome the fact that this form factor is a dinosaur it's not just that Apple priced it wrong it's that this entire chassis has been designed for a product that isn't inside of it I totally understand why Apple didn't want to develop an entirely new system for upgradable CPUs gpus and memory but it's still a real shame that they didn't because the Mac Pro has always been the high-end Workhorse upgradable solution dating all the way back to the Intel transition and the Power Mac before that and now it's just kind of a big unnecessary silly thing that nobody really needs to buy but let me know your thoughts in the comments below are you someone who could make use of this and if so why let me know all of that down below and thank you guys so much for watching I'll see you in the next one [Music] all right [Music] foreign

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 196,533

Keywords: Mac pro, m2 ultra, wwdc, WWDC23, Mac Pro Apple Silicon, M2 Mac Pro, Apple, Mac, M2 Mac, Video Editing, Final Cut Pro, Final Cut, Intel Mac Pro, Intel

Id: 1tqxhixEBzY

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023