Back in the Intel days, the Mac Pro was the computer many of us lusted over even if we had no possible justification for actually buying one. It was by far the most powerful Mac and the easiest to upgrade – not to mention one of the most beautiful machines the company ever made.
The 2023 Mac Pro was even more gorgeous than its predecessor, but with the radical new architecture of Apple Silicon, the writing was already on the wall …
Apple Silicon changed everything
The secret to the power and upgradability of the Mac Pro was the ability to install CPUs and GPUs of your choice, alongside additional RAM and hard drives or SSDs. However, the move to Apple Silicon put everything onto a single board.
That meant the machines were now nothing like as upgradable as they were before, and raised the question of whether there was any point in the machine anymore. Sure, Apple initially gave it a more powerful chip, but it could have put that chip in any other Mac.
Doubts about the need for the Mac Pro were further strengthened by the launch of the Mac Studio back in 2022. An M2 Ultra upgrade a year later saw the two machines offer identical performance. Things got even worse for the Mac Pro this year when the Mac Studio got an M3 Ultra chip. That means that the current Mac Studio is actually more powerful than the current Mac Pro while also being substantially cheaper.
The only benefit of the larger and more expensive machine is the availability of PCIe expansion slots and additional ports. However, since you can’t use PCIe slots for beefier graphics cards, they are a very niche need these days. In most cases, a Thunderbolt connection to an external accessory does the job.
Apple has ‘written off’ the Mac Pro
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported a few days ago that Apple has “largely written off the Mac Pro.”
Apple is no longer working on an M4 Ultra chip, and the Mac Pro that was slated to include that chip “was also nixed,” he says. This means Apple’s next high-end Apple SIlicon chip will be the M5 Ultra, and it’s currently only destined for the Mac Studio […] “From what I’ve heard inside the company, Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro,” Gurman writes. “The sentiment internally is that the Mac Studio now represents both the present and future of Apple’s professional desktop strategy.”
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