Many professional users have had more than enough with the Mac Studio, but the most demanding are still waiting for what should be Apple Silicon’s maximum potential exponent: the Mac Pro. Much is expected of it, including a certain modularity in its components to be able to further customize its power.
However, Mark Gurman dashed those hopes with a tweet: According to the leaker, the next Mac Pro you won’t have options to upgrade your GPU with graphics cards
A non-expandable, but very powerful GPU
The next Mac Pro may lack user-upgradable GPUs in addition to non-upgradable RAM. Currently, Apple Silicon Macs do not support external GPUs and you must use the configuration you purchase from Apple’s website. But the Mac Pro GPU will be powerful with up to 76 cores.
—Mark Gurman (@markgurman) January 26, 2023
Apple would make up for that with the most powerful GPU it’s ever made, going so far as to offer 76 graphics cores for professionals who need the most performance possible. Yes, there would be something we could expand: internal storage. It would be the only extension as such that Apple would offer, based on internal SSDs that can be configured at the time of purchase.
Gurman takes the opportunity to remind that the design of the Mac Pro will be maintained, and that the crucial difference with a hypothetical Mac Studio with M2 Ultra chip will be better cooling which would allow better performance. Now, it’s also possible that the same cooling allows for more cores in both the CPU and the GPU. We will continue to wait for further clues.