Apple Mac Pro 2013

I’ve also come to this realization as a longtime Mac user. Granted, I’m not old enough to have used the classic Mac OS as a professional, though I did use it in my childhood. However, I was in high school and college during the Jobs era of Mac OS X, and that’s when I started using Macs as my daily drivers from 2006 until 2022 when I retired my 2013 Mac Pro and 2013 MacBook Air and switched back to PCs running Windows. Before Apple’s success with the iPhone, Apple was essentially the Macintosh company. Its fortunes were tied to the Mac, and Apple seemed to be attuned to the needs of Mac users. In return, there was quite a strong Mac fandom. The Mac was more than just a tool or just a platform. The Mac was a philosophy, and what attracted people to the Mac was the philosophy of the Mac and its ecosystem. Ever since the iPhone became a major hit, and especially since the passing of Jobs, it became apparent to me that my best interests as a computer user and Apple’s interests as a company no longer align. Apple no longer needed to cater to “the Mac faithful” to survive. In fact, Apple is one of the biggest companies in the world thanks to the iPhone. It also seems that macOS is losing its distinctiveness. The unfortunate thing, and I think this is where some Mac users get emotional and disappointed, is that there’s nothing else out there in the personal computing landscape that is like the glory days of the Mac. Windows is an inconsistent mess filled with annoyances, an…

I still very actively use a Mac Pro 2013 (aka trashcan). It has 64 GB RAM, an 8 core Xeon cpu, and 1TB NVMe. I'm running macOS Monterey (12.7.6) on it. The hardware is still plenty powerful enough to be very useful. Supported software is getting to be more troublesome as the days go by. When the pain gets too great I'll look into installing Linux on it with the goal of continuing to use it.

I run the same setup Gemma 4 26B on a 2013 Mac Pro (dual graphics cards but they're useless for this). I also get about 5 t/s. It's perfectly serviceable for some tasks!

I have and use a Mac Pro 2013 too. Mine is 8 cores with 64 GB RAM. I haven't used mine for any LLM workloads, but it does just fine for most stuff. My biggest concern with it is the OS. I'm still running macOS (the latest supported version) but it's getting continually further out-of-date security wise all the time.

I've been running various models on a Mac Pro 2013 (8 cores, 32 GB RAM) at about 8 to 10 t/s for months. It's not fast, but it's more than enough for many actual tasks, in particular background tasks. An iMac pro will do just as well I suppose.

Mine is running as a container on an old Mac Pro 2013 (running Proxmox). My GPU is not even as good as yours. It runs great. The “beta timeline” required hashing that took forever but this was on my wife’s iPhone and nothing to do with the back-end (she has 50,000 photos). The machine-learning stuff uses the GPU. Facial recognition for example. It takes longer on low-end hardware but I am not sure why that is a problem.

True! Unfortunately, an enterprise machine is more likely to have considerable power draw and quite possibly be much louder. I have a 2013 Apple Mac Pro (trashcan) that uses ECC. They're also cheap, small, and quiet.

Agree overall. Just want to point out that Vulkan works on Intel Haswell. I have a 2013 MacBook Air and a 2013 Mac Pro that both have Haswell. Linux kernel 6.14 actually includes an Haswell Vulkan update from Intel themselves.

i bet the vents on the bottom coordinate with the silent fan direction for convective cooling and may be less efficient if inverted. my 2013 mac pro (the aluminum cylinder) and my powermac g4 cube both used that on purpose and i think my always silent mac studio does too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube

I love the power of Apple’s ARM Macs, and at work I always choose a Mac when given a choice between a PC running Windows. I love my work-issued MacBook Pro. However, for my personal equipment, it’s really difficult for me to stomach paying Apple’s inflated prices for RAM upgrades beyond their defaults (8GB won’t cut it for my workloads, and even 16GB sometimes feels cramped), and because the RAM is soldered, I have no choice but to either accept the default or to pay inflated prices for more RAM. Thus after 16 years of buying Macs for home use, I switched away from the Mac a few years ago; I have a Ryzen 9 build as my daily-driving desktop and a Framework 13 as my laptop. My Framework has 32GB of RAM and I can upgrade to 64GB at any time. I admit that I miss macOS at times, but WSL has dramatically improved the Windows experience for me. I loved my 2006 MacBook. It was lightweight for the time, and it was remarkably easy to make RAM and storage upgrades. I also enjoyed my 2013 Mac Pro, which I purchased refurbished in 2017. While it didn’t have expansion slots, I did upgrade the RAM during the pandemic from 12GB to 64GB, which was wonderful!

I can second OCLP — I've been running Sonoma on my daily-driver 2013 Mac Pro for the better part of a year (currently running 14.6), and with the exception of a minor graphical glitch (bits of the menu bar occasionally turn red until I switch applications) and Google Chrome not working with GPU rasterization enabled, it's been flawless.

You might find OpenCore Legacy Patcher[1] worth a look. In many cases, it allows later-that-supported Mac OS versions to be installed on older Macs. As a data point, I still use a 2013 Mac Pro as my primary desktop, and I've been using Sonoma on it for several months, have been able to install all Sonoma patches over-the-air on release without incident, and have only experienced a single, trivial problem: the right side of the menu bar occasionally appears shaded red, in a way that doesn't affect usability; switching applications immediately resolves the problem (the problem appears to be correlated with video playback). [1] https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/