If I had to guess, I’d say Apple sold less than 1,000 Mac Pros last year. Between the long wait for Apple silicon, the arrival of the Mac Studio, and the lack of meaningful upgrades, Apple’s most expensive Mac was probably only sold to the most desperate or oblivious Apple buyers.
It wasn’t supposed to be. When John Ternus teased the Apple Silicon Mac Pro for “another day” at Apple’s Peek Performance event last March, he seemed to give a nod and nod to the fanciest rumors of Apple. a machine significantly larger than the just-announced Mac Studio and its massive M1 Ultra chip. Fast forward 10 months, and we’re still waiting for the arrival of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
The safest bet would be the new Mac Pro arriving at WWDC, where the last three models debuted in 2006, 2013 and 2019. Apple likes to make a splash with its Mac Pro, and the WWDC keynote is the place ideal for doing so, with a captive audience of users ready and willing to spend $5,999 on a Mac “designed for pros who need the ultimate in processor performance.
However, while there’s no doubt that the new Mac Pro will reclaim its rightful position at the top of the Mac pyramid, the speed gains might not be as impressive as previous models. When the M1 Ultra brought a massive 20-core CPU and 64-core GPU to the Mac Studio, rumors started swirling about an “Extreme” chip with an insane 48 CPU cores and 152 graphics cores, more than two times more powerful than the superior-end Mac Studio. It would be the ultimate display of Apple silicon strength and usher in a new generation of Mac Pro that has few to no peers. Now, a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claims that Apple has canceled the workstation-class “Extreme” chip and will settle for a slightly bloated Ultra processor instead.
It’s still fast, mind you, but the difference between this and the Mac Studio, even if it sticks with an M1 chip for another year, won’t be as big as we’d hoped. So if the Mac Pro isn’t the fastest Mac you can buy now, and the new model won’t be much faster when it launches later this year, why does it even exist?
Identity crisis
According to Gurman’s report, the Mac Pro will feature an M2 Ultra processor with a 24-core CPU and a 76-core GPU, the same case design as the current model, and “slots” for storage, graphics, media and network cards, but not memory. (It’s not entirely clear how graphics expansion would work with Apple’s system-on-chip, but Gurman had previously reported that the Mac Pro would have “easy expandability for additional memory,” he said. so its source might be wrong about graphics card support. .) Expansion is obviously important for the Mac Pro, but with Thunderbolt’s 40Gb/s speed, internal upgrades are no longer as important. And the lack of aftermarket RAM upgrades means that Apple doesn’t make any Macs with user-upgradeable memory.
But the big question is, what is the identity of the Mac Pro? Over the past decade, the Mac Pro has consistently been Apple’s most innovative and powerful desktop machine, from the fascinating but frustrating cylinder to the current model’s cutting-edge thermal architecture and $699 wheels. However, as Apple’s silicon transition has continued, the Mac Pro has become less and less relevant and worthy of its price tag, and it desperately needs a facelift, one we thought be on the way.
The Mac Studio is as fast as a Mac Pro and can slide under a Studio Display.
Willis Lai/Foundry
But if the new model is only a bit faster than the Mac Studio and a bit more expandable than, say, the MacBook Pro, it’s not really a Mac Pro, is it? During Apple’s silicon transition, Apple has already killed off the iMac Pro and the 27-inch iMac without so much as a goodbye, and the Mac Pro seems to fit the same logic: a holdover from an older era that not live up to his own legacy. After the iMac and 24-inch MacBook Pro received impressive redesigns to go along with their new chips, I assumed that Apple’s first silicon Mac Pro would be something radical and revolutionary, requiring years of development. and an appropriate introduction to cap off the transition.
After all, that’s what the Mac Pro should be. If not, again I ask, is this really a Mac Pro?
I once thought the Mac Studio was a stopgap machine meant to fill the gap between Mac Pro updates, but now I’m not so sure. I assumed the Apple Silicon Mac Pro would be nothing short of a breakthrough, with a new class of processors, a radically new form factor, and a new identity that would put it back on the map. Apple had a chance to wow us with the design and speed of the Mac Pro and take its MPX modules to the next level, but if not, maybe the Mac Studio is all the business Mac we need.
Assuming the price of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro stays at $5,999 and is only about 30% faster than a maximum Mac Studio, it’s hard to see why anyone would spend $1,000 more for a larger case and an internal extension. Apple already sells the Mac Studio with “breakthrough performance, a wide range of peripheral connectivity, and a modular system to create the perfect setup,” so if the Mac Pro doesn’t bring a massive leap in performance, design and scalability, both of which need to exist?
We may never get that answer. Based on the Mac Pro’s update cadence, the model released by Apple this year will likely still be around three years from now. If Apple is struggling to justify its existence today, what will it look like in 2026? If the rumors are correct and Apple wanted the Mac Pro to be something much bigger than it will be, maybe it’s better to just drop it from the lineup rather than keep the name and nothing. ‘other.
