alt Hacker NewsWhy doesn't Apple make a tower PC with a standard ATX motherboard, power supply, extension cards, etc, like in the old days? That's immensely more upgradable, easier to cool, and I don't believe most people expect their desktops PCs to be tiny.
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I'd love for Apple to bring back the Mac Pro, but Apple hasn't had an affordable Mac Pro tower since the 2012 model. Apple got rid of the tower in 2013 in favor of the "trash can" model. When the trash can languished for years without updates due to limitations with its design, Apple brought back the tower Mac Pro in 2019, but at a dramatically higher entry MSRP, which priced out many users of tower and trash can Mac Pros (I have a "trash can" and was very disappointed by the 2019 Mac Pro's entry MSRP). The introduction of the Mac Studio revealed a large price gap between similarly-specified Mac Studio and Mac Pro models. Given the lack of expandable RAM in Apple Silicon Mac Pro models, and also given the lack of support for NVIDIA GPUs in macOS, there weren't a lot of customers for Apple Silicon Mac Pros when the Mac Studio was available at a lower price, and thus the Mac Pro got discontinued.
In many ways, the Mac Studio is the spiritual successor to the trash can Mac Pro. Apple Silicon's architecture solved the thermal problems that limited the trash can Mac Pro.
I'm actually coming around to realizing that I _do_ expect a desktop PC to be small. I'm finding myself only considering Mini ITX desktop cases when I think about upgrading my desktop. I only have one video card and don't have storage requirements that necessitate lots of 3.5" drives, a big nvme is all I need.
We no longer need CD/DVD/floppy drives, storage has shrunk/moved to the cloud. The only thing that's really grown inside a pc case is the video card, and most of these ITX cases are built specifically around fitting popular cards.
Even folks primarily focused on gaming are probably thinking that a full ATX case is a lot of wasted space.
Maybe it's just me, but I think ATX full and mid towers are going the way of the dinosaur.
> That's immensely more upgradable
This is the exactly reason.
The memory and GPU are integrated into the CPU so those can't be upgraded anyways. That's also how the memory can be so fast (shorter physical distance).
They sorta did right? It didn’t sell well at all.
Why would they / what would the consumer value be?
You can't upgrade the processor because it's soldered. You can't upgrade the ram because it's soldered. You can't upgrade the SSD because it's soldered / bonded to the CPU. You could maybe have some PCIe slots, but not many drivers for macOS, so what's the point?
Yes, it was different in the old days, but Apple is ever more a closed hardware architecture with few options. If you want choices, Apple is not for you.
They used to support that. Isn’t possible to do unified memory in those configurations? If not, then I expect it’s a headache Apple does not want to deal with. For example, earlier versions of Metal have unified/discrete memory modes with different API availability and behaviour in each - what a nightmare to support and maintain and keep bugs out it would be
Because it doesn't look cool?
The reason the mini & studio work as well as they do for the use cases that have made them popular again is because the architecture puts memory, cpu, and gpu/npu on the same die, and puts storage right next to it, which is why you get the storage & memory bandwidth you do. The separability of those components would break that, which is why the Mac Pro didn’t survive past one generation in the Apple Silicon era.