9to5Mac is saying Apple Silicon Mac Pro will be less upgradable than 2019 model, which only makes sense.

Ben Lovejoy over at 9to5Mac is reporting that they are hearing that the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro will be less upgradable than the current Intel version.

And this seems like a pretty big duh, of course.

The Apple Silicon MacPro will have to set itself apart with impressive CPU and GPU power as you are not going to be able to add either of these and I am even doubtful of PCI support. And I doubt there will ever be external GPU support through Thunderbolt on M1 Macs either, unless apple ever figures this out for their own hardware, but likely they would just like you to buy a new machine.

I am tending to doubt their will even be additional bays for RAM or Hard drives, though with a likely dual or quad M1 MAX, it will certainly be larger than a Mac Mini and need more cooling, but I doubt it will need to be too much bigger.

I would like to see more Thunderbolt ports though. The 4 Thunderbolt Ports on my iMac Pro are kind of a joke, and the MacPro has more and the video cards also add 4 additional ports, so 8 or more thunderbolt ports would be awesome (and 12 would be better, or at least 8 thunderbolt and 4 USB.

And maybe the ability to have 2 raided hard drives for video, but with the prices Apple charge for SSD hard drives, that would cost a fortune, but it would be great for video editing.

Any which way it will be the raw processing power of the chips and the included ProRES accelerators that really makes this machine rock and roll for video editors.

Reuben Evans at OWC’s Tech Talk Blog on what Top Pros want from Apple as a Platform

OWC’s Tech Talk blog has an article with Top Video Pros Weight In On Where Apple Should Take Its Platform. 

It is a good article, if a little too FCP X focused overall. I made my huge post on the problems that I have with extensive use of FCP X, and I wish Apple would deal with them before adding too much else, though collaborative editing might help with some of my complaints quite a bit, but there are still so many to go into.

I totally agree that Apple needs to knock it out of the park with a GPU, but not just for Cinema4D, but also for Premiere Pro (as well as DaVinci). And yea the CPU needs to really stomp ass with After Effects for sure.

An updated XDR display should happen quickly, and the new version should also be the basis for a new iMac Pro.

And yes the Afterburner card needs to be able to decode different codecs as well, not just ProRES, and that should also be either added to the iMac, or make a breakout box with BlackMagic and include the tech in that along with an HDMI out and in.

I really do wish I could afford a MacPro, though with the M1, it calls it into question. Be really weird if Apple ends up with the MacPro as the only Intel Mac, and a medium machine like the article calls for as M1.