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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