The secret behind the Mac Pro’s immense power and legendary upgradability was the freedom to install whichever CPUs and GPUs you wanted, along with as much RAM, storage (HDDs or SSDs), or expansion cards as you needed. With the switch to clearly superior Apple Silicon, however, the CPU, GPU, and RAM are now permanently fused onto a single system-on-chip (SoC) package that is soldered to the logic board. As a result, the Mac Pro has lost basically all of the user-upgradable components that once justified its existence.
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.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported a few days ago that Apple has “largely written off the Mac Pro.”
Sad as I would be to see it go, I think this does make sense. The reason for the Mac Pro’s existence – its expandability – no longer applies. Leaving aside the tiny niche of the tiny niche of Mac Pro owners who benefited from the portability of being able to put all of the additional storage inside the casing, there’s just no benefit over the Mac Studio.
MacDailyNews Take: Being even less torn up about it than Ben, we wrote earlier this week, “Bring on the M5 Ultra Mac Studio and rename it ‘Mac Pro.'”
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The only other Mac variant that you might need at this point, would be to make a Mac Studio that is optimized for rack mounting. I know there are some companies using Mac minis and Studio in server farms, but no idea how common this practice is.
MDN is wrong. You guys down get it. You lost the pro market. yOu cannot put U.2 ESDFF drives in a mac studio. You need a Mac pro with PCI slots. The 3d world has now 100% abandoned the mac. They are gone. Other pro markets are also gone.
This “i dont use it so no one should have it” is communist retarded thinking. Those are the think different people you are so indifferent about. You basically told them to go pound sand because you so personally happy. Ok, they only saved the company from bankruptcy last time around. Now they wont be there if you ever need them again.
Unusually poor thinking by MDN on this one.
Nailed it.
Apple fukked up.
Tim Cook decided that something like a Chromebook was sufficient for Apple users.
the desktop macs need desktop processors. who wants to watch paint dry. the pro should start at 256, and have 512 and 1TB of ram. 4 TB hard drive lowest end be able to use other graphic cards and run at 6.5 GHz. the lanes should be no less than 256.
The statement, “clearly superior Apple Silicon” is absolutely true for some things, but not for many things for which a user needs a true workstation.
The top of the line (and near top of the line) GPUs out there today trounce even the M5 and almost certainly will very handily beat what will be the future M5 variants. The top of the line workstation CPUs are the same relative to the M5 series. For too many situations a Thunderbolt connected expansion box just won’t suffice.
I need/use more Thunderbolt connections than are in the Mac Studio. Yes, Thunderbolt 5 will help, but it is nowhere near a panacea. The bidirectional capability of even a PCIe 5 x4 slot will beat the symmetric, bidirectional capability of a Thunderbolt 5 port. And that’s 1/4 of the bandwidth of a PCIe 5 x16 slot. I won’t even get into the PCIe 6 slots (x1 through x16) that have recently started to come out, or the recently released PCIe 7 spec that will support bandwidths four times that of PCIe 5.
I remember the days, even though they were relatively short lived, when Apple had to get special permission to export the top of the line Power Mac to non U.S. countries. It was that capable! Apple’s Macs had a clear performance lead. Apple has absolutely squandered that lead.
Apple is slowly (but surely?) turning into an appliance maker and a media producer. No amount of saying, “The Mx processor is so capable Macs don’t need anything else.”, will change that because except for those people just wanting an appliance the statement is just not true. If Apple does abandon the Mac Pro, then that slide into appliance maker and media producer and NOT a computer maker is virtually guaranteed.