If I had to guess, I’d think Apple sold fewer than 1,000 Mac Pros last year. Between the long wait for Apple’s processor, the release of Mac Studio, and the lack of meaningful upgrades, Apple’s most expensive Mac likely sold only to the most desperate or unsuspecting customers.
It wasn’t meant to be. When John Ternus teased our curiosity by saying the Mac Pro would arrive “another day” at Apple’s Peek Performance event last March, he seemed to be hinting at a machine considerably larger than the Mac Studio and its massive M1 Ultra chip. Fast forward 10 months and we’re still waiting for the Apple Mac Pro to launch.
The safest bet is for the Mac Pro to launch in time for WWDC, where the last three models made their debut in 2006, 2013 and 2019. Apple likes to make a grand entrance with the Mac Pro, and the WWDC keynote is the perfect opportunity to do so, with a audience that is ready and willing to spend tens of thousands of kroner on a Mac “designed for professionals who need ultimate cpu performance.”
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But while there’s no doubt that the new Mac Pro will once again take its rightful position at the top of the Mac pyramid, performance may not be anywhere near the strides made by previous models. When the M1 Ultra, with its 20-core CPU and 64-core GPU, was launched in Mac Studio, rumors began to swirl about an “extreme” chip, with an insane 48 CPU cores and 152 graphics cores, more than twice as powerful as the most maxed out Mac Studio. It would be the ultimate showcase of Apple’s processors and usher in a new Mac Pro generation that has few, if any, equals. Now rumors from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claim that Apple has discontinued the development of the “extreme” chip and will settle for a slightly hyped Ultra processor instead.
It’s still fast, but the difference between it and the Mac Studio — even if it has an M1 chip for another year — won’t be as big as we’d hoped. If the Mac Pro isn’t the fastest Mac you can buy now, and the new model won’t even be significantly faster when it launches later this year, why does it exist?
Identity crisis
According to Gurman, the Mac Pro will have an M2 Ultra processor with a 24-core cpu and 76-core gpu, the same design as the current model, and room for storage, graphics, media and network cards, but not memory (it’s not quite clear how graphics expansion would work with Apple’s SoC, but Gurman previously reported that the Mac Pro would have “expandability for additional memory” (it’s possible his source is wrong about graphics card support). Expansion is obviously important for the Mac Pro, but with thunderbolt’s speed of 40 Gb/s, internal upgrades are not as important anymore.
But the bigger question is: what is the Mac Pro’s identity? Over the last decade or so, the Mac Pro has consistently been Apple’s most innovative and powerful desktop computer, from the fascinating but oh-so-frustrating “trash” to the current model’s state-of-the-art thermal architecture and $8,700 wheels. While Apple’s processor transition has rolled on, the Mac Pro has become less relevant and worth its price and is in desperate need of a rejuvenation, one we assumed was coming.
But if the new model is only slightly faster than the Mac Studio and slightly more expandable than, say, the Macbook Pro, then it’s not really a Mac Pro, is it? Apple’s new processors have already killed the Imac Pro, and the 27-inch Imac and Mac Pro seem to fit the same logic: a holdover from an older era that can’t live up to its own legacy. After the 24-inch Imac and Macbook Pro were redesigned to accompany their new circuits, I assumed that the first Apple Silicon Mac Pro would be something radical and revolutionary, needing years of development and a proper introduction to make the transition.
After all, that’s what the Mac Pro is supposed to be. If it isn’t, then I ask again, is it really a Mac Pro?
I used to think that the Mac Studio was a machine meant to fill the space between Mac Pro updates, but now I’m not so sure. I assumed that Apple’s “M” Mac Pro would be a breakthrough, with a new class of processor, a radically new form factor and new identity that put it back on the map. Apple has an opportunity to blow us away with both the design and speed of the Mac Pro and take its MPX modules to the next level, but if they don’t then the Mac Studio might be the only pro Mac we need.
If we assume that the price of the Apple “M” Mac Pro remains at SEK 72,000 and is only about 30 percent faster than a maxed-out Mac Studio, then it’s hard to see why anyone would spend an additional SEK 10,000 for a larger chassis and internal expansion. Apple already sells the Mac Studio with the words “groundbreaking performance, a wide range of peripheral connections and a modular system to create the perfect setup”, so if the Mac Pro doesn’t make a huge leap in performance, design and expandability, why should both exist?
Translated and edited by Petter Ahrnstedt
