GoKawiilI reluctantly accepted last year that the end of the line for the Mac Pro was an inevitability. It had already effectively been replaced by the Mac Studio, and a macOS 26 feature was another nail in its coffin.
Yesterday was a day that had been coming since the first Apple Silicon Mac. I do think it’s the right call, but confess to still being a little sad to see it happen …
The end of the Mac Pro was inevitable
As I wrote last year, 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.
That was made all the clearer in 2023, when the Mac Studio got an M2 Ultra upgrade to match the performance of the top-end Mac Pro. At that point, there was already no benefit to the higher price tag and much larger form factor of the Pro.
Things got even worse when the Mac Studio got an M3 Ultra chip, making it more powerful than the Mac Pro. Sure, you had the PCIe expansion slots in the latter, but since you couldn’t use them for more powerful graphics cards, they were of very little benefit. A Thunderbolt connection to an external accessory did the same job.
As if that weren’t bad enough, macOS 26.2 introduced low-latency connectivity between multiple Macs using Thunderbolt 5. Clustering four Mac Studios in this way gave you a desktop supercomputer that was way more powerful than a Mac Pro.
But I still feel a little sad
There can be very few Mac fans who didn’t lust over the Intel Mac Pro back in the day. We may have had no possible justification for buying one, but we wanted it just the same.
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