Apple Mac Pro Fades Into Oblivion

It seems like it was only a matter of time. In 2019, Apple finally gave in to vocal demands for a modular PC-like professional tower system to replace its idiosyncratic trash Mac Pro from the 2013 era, but it never really felt like the company’s heart was in the new, slightly more traditional model. Apple last refreshed it in 2023 with an M2 Ultra processor, after which it simply began the process of slowly fading away. On Thursday, the company confirmed to 9to5Mac that it had been discontinued and would not be replaced.

I contacted Apple for more information, but did not immediately receive a response.

Part of the problem with the Mac Pro was that the intent didn’t fit easily into Apple’s system-on-a-chip strategy for its M-series processors. As I commented at the time, “However, the irony of the M2 Ultra upgrade is that Apple essentially made the Mac Pro less modular, which is why everyone was clamoring for it in the first place.”

SoCs integrate the memory and GPU on the chip, and the whole point of workstation-class modularity is the ability to upgrade the memory and GPU, as well as link multiple GPUs together: the chips don’t support discrete GPUs either. And with all the slots essentially there for Afterburner-style expansion cards for intensive video processing – they’re gone too, btw – I always felt like the target market was rather narrowly focused on people working in Apple TV and cinema production workflows.

Another reason why modularity is important for this class of workstations is that they are very expensive and, in many cases, are maintained by IT departments, who are very fond of mixing and matching components, passing them on as the luckier ones upgrade to newer equipment. And being able to spread the expenses of the new system over time is also attractive.

The compact Mac Studiothe company’s most powerful desktop computer, replaced the Mac Pro as its flagship device with the launch of the M3 Ultra, and it aligns much better with Apple’s silicon strategy. The Pro Display XDR debuted in conjunction with the Mac Pro and was aimed at that same audience. It was also discontinued this year and replaced with the smaller, more user-friendly, Mac Studio-aligned Studio. Studio XDR Display.

Now that much of the high-end workstation market has shifted toward GPU-intensive AI operations like machine learning (especially deep learning) and related development like robotics, the lack of scalability has become even more of a drawback. It makes sense that Apple would want to funnel its Ultra chips to the most popular Mac Studios.

I guess the upside is that Apple doesn’t have to reclaim memory and other components in short supply, thanks to AI-driven shortages, or renew its ties with Nvidia, which Apple broke up with in 2018.