[PB PM]

Originally Posted by Brad I'd bet two nickles that if these compute units ever come to fruition, they will have a totally custom interface that slots only into the next-gen Mac Pro because $$$. No Thunderbolt. No USB. New proprietary Apple nonsense. I want to be wrong, but I doubt I will be.

They'll call it the ASC port = Apple Speed Connect. And you'll need a $199 dual thunderbolt to ASC dongle for that.

[dglow]

Originally Posted by Brad I'd bet two nickles that if these compute units ever come to fruition, they will have a totally custom interface that slots only into the next-gen Mac Pro because $$$. No Thunderbolt. No USB. New proprietary Apple nonsense. I want to be wrong, but I doubt I will be.

I suspect you will be right – at first. Internal cards for the Mac Pro, to start, will expose devs and supply a development platform to work on.

Once software has been tweaked to support this architecture, and maybe after interface speeds double again with USB4 v2, perhaps then we’ll see ‘external’ modules introduced.

[Frank777]

Where is this mythical March event? Are we really going to have to wait until WWDC now?

[PB PM]

It’s not even the middle of the month yet, plenty of time.

[Frank777]

Hopefully.

I'm start to think Apple will include a 5.25" bay for an optional BluRay drive, since that's the only expansion idea they could come up with.

Kick's take on the compute units thing seems about right.
But it's likely to be a Thunderbolt 5 thing, and it's still a Thunderbolt 4 world.

[709]

If there's no GPU or RAM user upgradeability there's no point to a Mac Pro. Throw some new MxUltras in a Studio case, coat it Space Gray and there you go – that's what I expect the new Mac Pro will be. The compute units sound amazing but they'd be useful for such a tiny, tiny sliver of the market that I really can't see Apple going there. Daisy chaining a bunch of product for additional oomf, sure, maybe.