Mark Gurman, in his (paywalled, alas) Power On column for Bloomberg over the weekend:
The next major update didn’t arrive until 2023, when Apple
finally transitioned the desktop to in-house chips with the M2
Ultra Mac Pro. Two years later, that model remains largely
unchanged. And it’s been overshadowed by the Mac Studio, which
received the M3 Ultra chip earlier this year while the Mac Pro
stayed put.Now here’s the bad news: That doesn’t look set to change
anytime soon. There’s no longer an M4 Ultra in the works (a Mac
Pro to support it was also nixed), and the next high-end desktop
chip will be the M5 Ultra. So far, Apple is only focused on a new
Mac Studio for the processor. That suggests the Mac Pro won’t be
updated in 2026 in a significant way.From what I’ve heard inside the company, Apple has largely written
off the Mac Pro. The sentiment internally is that the Mac Studio
now represents both the present and future of Apple’s professional
desktop strategy.
Here’s a comparison of the now-two-year-old M2 Ultra Mac Pro with the M3 Ultra and M4 Max Mac Studios. I’d love to see Apple pursue some sort of M# Extreme chip that goes above and beyond the M# Ultra variants, but unless they do, they’re not much point to a 32-pound suitcase-sized enclosure that offers little more than the Studio’s small 8-pound enclosure. The difference mostly comes down to the Pro’s internal PCI Express expansion slots, but those slots don’t support third-party GPUs from Nvidia or AMD.
See also: Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica.
