Apple has effectively abandoned the Mac Pro as a going concern. Inside the company, the prevailing view is that the Mac Studio has fully supplanted it—serving as both the current flagship and the long-term cornerstone of Apple’s high-end desktop lineup for professionals.
In 2019, Apple unveiled a ground-up redesign of the Mac Pro — a towering, cheese-grater-styled aluminum beast that deliberately echoed the iconic Power Mac G5 look from the mid-2000s. At launch, the company loudly promised that this machine would receive regular updates and stay a cornerstone of the professional Mac lineup for years to come. That commitment lasted about as long as the hype cycle.
Mark Gurman fro Bloomberg News:
[Mac Studio] received the M3 Ultra chip earlier this year while the Mac Pro stayed put.
Now here’s the bad news: That doesn’t look set to change anytime soon. There’s no longer an M4 Ultra in the works (a Mac Pro to support it was also nixed), and the next high-end desktop chip will be the M5 Ultra. So far, Apple is only focused on a new Mac Studio for the processor. That suggests the Mac Pro won’t be updated in 2026 in a significant way.
From what I’ve heard inside the company, Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro. The sentiment internally is that the Mac Studio now represents both the present and future of Apple’s professional desktop strategy.
MacDailyNews Take: Bring on the M5 Ultra Mac Studio and rename it “Mac Pro.”
Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
IF accurate, this may be the dumbest move by Apple in a very, very long time.
The Mac Pro and its top end predecessors have been the flagship Macs since the 80s. Hell, back then the top end desktop could do unprecedented things such as being able to connect up through six monitors concurrently! Even the ancient NUBUS slots/cards were way ahead of their time with their auto configuration capability. (At the time, setting those stupid dip switches to properly configure some add in cards for IBM PCs and compatibles was a task beyond the vast majority of users.)
Mac Studio is fine for many people, but the Mac Pro fills a niche that the Mac Studio likely never will.
IF Apple abandons the Mac Pro, then the top end Mac is truly lost.
SHadowself,
It’s already happening. I just bought a MacMini (1TB RAM and 32GB).
I also bought a Samsung 4TB Chip. Apple is too expensive for this so the don’t produce them. As for the external monitor Apple just dosn’t the goods
And now for the screen:
I bought the BenQ 27′ 5K monitor. A worthy set-up of monitor tech than waht Apple offers
Apple is already losing the centre who are consumers who, say like me and we need a setup at least a more powerful as the 24 inch iMacs but with an affordable 5k monitor.
Apple’s is too expensive and I suspect the new release ill make amtters worse.
So I’m glad I went the way I did. I saved $US500 and ths the first time EVER I have bought a non Apple monitor.
For the record I’m a 71 y.o. who has been using Macs since 1993. Apple is not the Apple I know.
In this post I only focused on hardware. I’ll get to rubbishing their software such as completely locking down their OS thus pretty much many of decision limiting purchases to their Store are financial.
Apologies for the typos, I didn’t have my glasses on.
Why not?
Apple sucks balls. That they can’t even do a simple update to the 2023 machine. Cook sucks. And everyone at Apple sucks. They drove away all professionals. The studio is another garbage can Mac. Just pathetic. They’ve learned nothing and deserve to have lost the professional market to the pc.
So why are you here if they’re so irrelevant to you?’
I don’t necessarily disagree with everything you say just the way you express it.
Just because this is MacDailyNews it doesn’t means you have to park your decorum at the door (so to speak).
I am a fairly basic Mac user, needing media machinery for designing books and mags, photo manipulation, video making.
Apple equipment is fine for all that (and has been so for many decades) though some always need more power.
The current range suits me fine, and an iPad can do a surprising amount of useful work. It sounds fine too, when the day’s work is done.