Apple discontinues Mac Pro

It's the end of an era.

Last week, Apple confirmed to 9to5Mac, along with reports of its deleted page on Apple's website, that Apple has officially discontinued the Mac Pro line. No new hardware will be coming out for the Mac Pro line, though the M2 Ultra model will still be available through the Apple refurbished store for a little while longer.

It was clear to most people that the Mac Pro was essentially dead around the time of Apple Silicon's announcement back in 2020. Though it had just come out, the Mac Pro's modularity was essentially destroyed the moment the unified ARM architecture of Apple Silicon was explained. Everything is on the chip, so the point of the Mac Pro's upgradability disintegrated.

However, people pushed on, hoping for some kind of Mac Pro with Apple silicon replacement that would bring these ideas together. Many reports came in that there could be hardware cards almost, where different chips could be slotted in and out, all containing the SoC, with the RAM, CPU, and GPU all baked in. But, it turned out to be just too logistically and economically difficult, even for a machine that is $5000+.

So, what Apple ended up doing was just slapping an M2 Ultra chip from the Mac Studio in a Mac Pro chassis and calling it a day. It was, and still is, a very fast computer, with great efficiency and low power draw, but its usefulness seems to be fading. With essentially the same performance as the Mac Studio that it sat alongside (and now less with the refreshed M4 Max/M3 Ultra Mac Studio), and no upgradeability to be found, buyers of the Mac Pro were left distraught, with no other real option.

No other computer in Apple's lineup has 1.5 TB of RAM, or the GPU, CPU, or storage upgrade potential that the Mac Pro did have up until the Apple silicon model. However, with new advancements in Thunderbolt and software to connect computers, it is now very possible to use multiple Mac Studios, each with up to 512GB of RAM (now only 256GB, since Apple removed the 512GB of RAM option recently, likely due to the RAM shortage). AI models, the most prevalent current use case, can run well off of multiple computers, and it seems that a (somewhat) reasonable replacement for the Mac Pro (at least on the power side) is here. Nothing that Apple currently sells, however, will beat the user upgradeability of the Mac Pro, and it is unlikely we will see anything like that from Apple in a long time. Hopefully that will change soon, and computers will become more upgradeable and repairable.

The Mac Pro was a great high-end Mac desktop that brought power and versatility to the Mac lineup. We will have to wait and see what Apple does soon.