Marco Arment On Mac Pro Rumors

Marco Arment discusses recent rumors that the new Mac Pro will somehow be scaled down:

If the Mac Pro’s replacement doesn’t have at least 4 internal RAM slots, 2 PCI-Express slots, and 2–4 drive bays, Apple’s going to get a lot of angry professionals, and a lot of them are going to rush to buy refurbished 2010 Mac Pros.

One big question is whether they’ll still offer dual-socket configurations — their omission would anger many buyers, but not as many as those other changes, and the benefits could be substantial: they could stop relying on Intel’s less-frequently-updated 2P Xeons and make a much smaller, cheaper, cooler, more frequently updated lineup using the Xeon E3 series. But the E3, being only slightly different from Intel’s desktop chips, is limited to 32 GB of RAM, which wouldn’t be well-received in a system that has supported 128 GB since 2009.

My main area of research focuses around scientific computing. Specifically, I use computer models to either predict or simulate atmospheric flows. These codes solve complex equations for multiple variables on millions of grid points at thousands of time periods. Accordingly, these models benefit from multiple, robust processors and large amounts of memory.

Over the past four years, I have used a Mac Pro for my scientific computing. In fact, our small research group has four Mac Pros, ranging from the 2008 to 2010 models. Apple’s tower was an obvious choice for me because it meets the technical requirements of our work and the personal requirements of my design taste.¹ If Apple drops support for dual-socket configurations - thus reducing the number of computing cores and limiting memory expandability - I might just have to order a refurbished 2010 model. In any case, I wouldn’t classify such a change as “really great.”