Marco Arment

Like, it makes sense, but it is the one failure.

And lots of people are saying, okay, but that was a different era.

Nobody needs expandable RAM or internal storage or slots.

All those things are, you know, we don't need those anymore.

Setting aside whether there's really zero use for slots, I mean, part of that is Apple's decision to not support third-party GPUs, but setting that aside, especially in the AI age, I would argue that potentially having a giant case stocked with a bunch of NVIDIA GPUs for doing AI stuff would actually be a useful thing, but Apple doesn't get along with NVIDIA anyway.

Set the slots aside entirely.

Just within the realm of is there any room in Apple's product line for something that is not something more powerful than Mac Studio?

I've always said and I continue to say absolutely yes.

And here's why.

Right now, we have great examples of applications that run on Macs that we wish would go faster, that we wish had more capability.

Local models, local AI models.

Yeah, you can gang together a bunch of Mac studios, but basically local models will use every ounce of computation and memory you could possibly throw at them.

The Mac Studio is great, but it's a plus size Mac mini.

It's not that big.

with the new SOIC-MH chiplet architecture, where Apple can do separate dyes and put them into things, they're now able to make chips that are bigger than they used to when they would take the M-whatever-max, which was close to the reticle limit, close to the biggest chip that they could possibly make, and they would take two of those and combine them and call it an Ultra.

And it's like, well, there's no point.

If the Ultra fits in the studio, there's no point in ever having...

anything other than the studio because that's the biggest chip we can make but now with the cpu and gpu at least being separate the cpu can be as big as an m4 max or whatever the gpu can be as m4 max and you can combine two of those and now you've got a monster chip but guess what you cannot put that monster chip inside a max studio because it can't dissipate the heat so

Why does Apple still need something, whether it's a Mac Pro or whatever, something bigger than the Mac Studio?

Because they're leaving computation on the table.