Why 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.
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.
SSD controller is on the same die, but the actual SSDs in a Mac Studio are slotted and technically upgradeable. Storage bandwidth generally matches NVMe drives of the same generation, as Apple is ultimately using the same NAND modules over PCIe.
My ideal Mac Studio would have an NVMe slot or two for additional internal storage, and those slots could be accessed without opening the case. But Apple won't do that, as convenient internal storage upgrades would likely lower their profits.
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.
Apple wants to sell you a new system every couple of years, they don't want you to upgrade. They want you to throw it away the system completely and replace it (and they claim they are environmentally sustainable, btw) when in the PC world you would replace RAM, CPU, GPU, motherboard, maybe the SSD, but surely you can keep the power supply for decades, keep cooling fans, not talking about the chassis that could last 50 years because it's a just metal box.
They are a rip off these products, and I don't understand people that buys them.
BTW even when Apple did produce towers like Mac Pro they did so in a purposely non-standard way, such that you couldn't, for example, replace the PSU with a standard ATX one, the only standard components were really RAM, HDD, CD-ROM drive and in Intel models the CPU, and of course PCI expansion boards (sort of, because to work GPUs needed to have an Apple specific firmware in the old PowerPC models). You couldn't for example upgrade the motherboard, if you wanted to change the CPU to a new generation you also needed to buy a entirely new Mac with a new chassis, new PSU, etc even if what you had were perfectly fine.
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.
> Maybe it's just me, but I think ATX full and mid towers are going the way of the dinosaur.
Even standard ATX cases are kind of small if you want to build a full custom loop and need space for radiators, pumps, reservoirs, tubes, etc. My O11 XL is admittedly enormous, but it is under my desk and does not occupy any space that wouldn't otherwise remain unused.
As for storage, I categorically refuse to store things in the cloud. My files belong at home on my hardware, not on someone else's computer in the "cloud."
Personally I'd love to have a smaller PC for gaming, but I've been scared off by Mini-ITX supposedly being harder to work with and tending to have worse cooling and therefore worse noise. I wish PCs were less fiddly to put together.
But then how will you fit your action figures and extra displays that go in your case?
They were obsolete a decade ago, but priced out by artificially expensive "SFF PC" cases, fans, and power supplies. PC building completely transitioned to fashionable cargo cult in the late 2010's, with the rise of twitch.
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 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
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.
