Chance Miller with a big scoop at 9to5Mac:
It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the
Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s
website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on
Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s
homepage, where all references have been removed.Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to
offer future Mac Pro hardware.The Mac Pro has lived many lives over the years. Apple released
the current Mac Pro industrial design in 2019 alongside the Pro
Display XDR (which was also discontinued earlier this
month). That version of the Mac Pro was powered by Intel, and
Apple refreshed it with the M2 Ultra chip in June 2023. It has
gone without an update since then, languishing at its $6,999 price
point even as Apple debuted the M3 Ultra chip in the Mac
Studio last year.
In the Power PC era, the high-end Mac desktops were called PowerMacs and the pro laptops were PowerBooks. With the transition to Intel CPUs in 2006, Apple changed the names to Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. But unlike the MacBook Pro — which has seen major revisions every few years and satisfying speed bumps on a regular basis, and which has thrived in the Apple Silicon era — the Mac Pro petered out after a few years.
After its 2006 introduction, there were speed bumps in 2008, 2009, 2010, and lastly in 2012. So far so good. But then came the cylindrical “trash can” Mac Pro in 2013. Perhaps the fact that Apple pre-announced it at WWDC in June before releasing it in October put a curse on the name. The cylindrical Mac Pro was never updated, and Apple being Apple, where the price is part of the product’s brand, they never dropped the price either. This culminated in a small “roundtable” discussion I was invited to in 2017, where Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi laid out Apple’s plans for the future of Mac hardware. Step one was the iMac Pro, a remarkable machine but a one-off, that arrived in December 2017. Then came the rejuvenated Mac Pro in 2019, the last Intel-based model and the first with the fancy drilled-hole aluminum tower enclosure. After that, there was only one revision: the M2 Ultra model in June 2023.
So after 2012, there was one trash can Mac Pro in 2013, one Intel “new tower” Mac Pro in 2019, and one Apple Silicon Mac Pro in 2023. No speed bumps in between any of them. Three revisions in the last 14 years. So, yeah, not a big shock that they’re just pulling the plug officially.
