New Mac Pro release date: M4/M5 Ultra Mac Pro rumors, processor specs & price
New Mac Pro: Will it use an M4 Ultra or M5 Ultra processor?
- Previous reports indicated that the Mac Pro could be upgraded with an M4 Ultra with “enhanced AI capabilities.”
- A more recent report indicated that Apple had the M5 Max and Ultra in development
In the two years since the M2 Ultra Mac Pro launched, it has lost its position as the most powerful Mac. In our Geekbench 6 testing of the M4 Max chip, we found it to be faster than the Mac Pro’s M2 Ultra. Read: How Apple’s M4 chips allayed all my fears about buying a new Mac.
The M3 Ultra is even faster than the M4 Max, which arrived in Mac Studio in March 2025. The Mac Studio with M3 Ultra is currently the fastest Mac in Apple’s lineup. Why didn’t Apple update the Mac Pro with an M3 Ultra? If Apple wanted to use the M3 Ultra in the Mac Pro, it would have already updated that Mac. Apple must have planned something much more powerful.
In an April 2024 report, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said the Mac Pro was part of Apple’s AI focus and would be upgraded with an M4 with enhanced AI capabilities. The M4 Ultra, which has been reported as the Mac Pro’s chip, is expected to have an improved Neural Engine for AI features. The M3 Ultra combines two M3 Max chips, so it follows that the M4 Ultra would do the same. It has been reported that Apple will change the processor architecture so that we could see higher performance than previous Ultra chips.
The Information reported in December 2024 that during the previous summer, Apple canceled a “high-performance chip for Mac” to focus on developing an AI server chip. As John Gruber pointed out, the timing of this Mac chip project suggests that the canceled chip was likely a chip dubbed “Extreme” that would be faster than an Ultra.
On August 14, 2025, Macworld reported seeing internal code released by Apple that confirms the company is still experimenting with a new high-end Mac Pro powered by an unreleased M4 Ultra chip.
In November, a report indicated that the Mac Studio would be upgraded with the M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips in 2026. Could these chips make it into the Mac Pro?
Foundry
On November 4, 2025, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reported that Apple had an M5 Max and an M5 Ultra Mac Studio in its release schedule for 2026. He did not mention the Mac Pro. It’s still possible that Apple will release an M4 Ultra Mac Pro before Mac Studio 2026, which would make it the fastest Mac. But this title would be short-lived if the M5 Ultra Mac Studio were released less than a year later.
It seems possible that Apple will forgo an update to the M4 Ultra Mac Pro and release an M5 Ultra Mac Pro at the same time as the M5 Ultra Mac Studio. However, this is just speculation; no reports have been made about this.
