Goodbye, Mac Pro
Chance Miller (Hacker News, Mac Power Users, Slashdot):
Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.
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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.
With that in mind, the Mac Studio is clearly set up to be the ‘pro’ desktop Mac of the future in Apple’s lineup. The Mac Studio can be configured with the M3 Ultra chip and a 32-core CPU and an 80-core GPU, paired with 256GB of unified memory and 16TB of SSD storage.
In addition to discontinuing the Mac Pro, Apple today discontinued the $700 wheel add-on kit that it sold for the Mac Pro.
Below, we reflect on nearly two decades of the Mac Pro.
So after 2012 — and arguably after 2010 — 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.
It’s not a shock that a product that was underpowered and overpriced wouldn’t sell well, leading to cancellation. The mystery is why Apple seemed to repeatedly come up with designs that were not what customers were asking for and why it couldn’t manage to do basic speed bump updates. Presumably the answer is internal politics. I’m not sure what to make of the reporting that John Ternus was apparently one of the champions of the Mac Pro and that he’s likely to be the next CEO, yet the product is being killed.
Schiller said in that 2017 meeting that the new Mac Pro was being designed “so that we can keep it fresh with regular improvements,” and Apple did quietly update the system a couple of times with fresh GPU options. But by the time the Mac Pro finally arrived in late 2019, Apple was just months away from introducing the first of the Apple Silicon Macs, and the writing had been on the wall for Intel Macs for a while.
Apple Silicon ended up being the final nail in the coffin for the concept of the Mac Pro. The chips’ unified memory architecture meant memory upgrades were impossible. Their integrated GPUs meant they didn’t support external graphics cards from AMD or Nvidia and couldn’t be upgraded over time.
What does matter in audio production is latency. Thunderbolt is a cable, when most PCIe slots are a handful of inches through one electrical trace away from the CPU. Thunderbolt does add processing delay compared to on-board slots directly.
No doubt a bunch of PCIe expansion chassis will appear to cater to the professionals that used the Mac Pro for its only remaining strength, its slots.
It will be very interesting to see how the workarounds will fare at solving problems for professionals that Apple were, until fairly recently, valuing highly enough to publicly apologize to.
One little thing that I came across is that Apple now no longer sells a Mac with expansion slots. While the argument could be made that the 2013-2019 “trash can” Mac Pro also put those slots on hiatus, it did feature upgradeable RAM and storage, as well as a modular card for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Prior to that, the last time no Macs included expansion slots was before the introduction of the Macintosh II and my beloved Macintosh SE.
Apple decided to start caring about the Mac Pro again at the worst possible time. The Intel Mac Pro, while excellent, arrived just six months before the announcement that the Mac would transition to Apple silicon. After which, the Mac Pro didn’t offer any better performance than the Mac Studio. Just the card slots — which you couldn’t put a GPU in.
Due to Apple silicon’s all-in-one architecture, the Ultra-tier chip pushes the limits of what Apple can fabricate at a reasonable price. The bigger the chip is on the die, the lower the yield of good chips will be made, raising the cost further.
Apple reportedly experimented with making a higher-tier chip than the Ultra — often referred to as the “Extreme” chip, though the name is just speculation. It was canceled for being too expensive.
Had Apple stuck to the original timeline, and killed off the 2013 Mac Pro in favor of an iMac “specifically targeted at large segments of the pro market,” back in 2017, Apple could have avoided putting out the best Intel Mac ever, less than a year before the transition to Apple silicon.
Did Apple know in 2017 that 2020 was the year the M1 would make it out of the lab? Probably not, but it doesn’t make the timing any more painful.
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The company yanked the pro market around for over a decade. The Mac Pro was old, then it was new! It did not support internal expansion, then it did! With every change of its mind, Apple lost more and more trust of would-be Mac Pro buyers.
Without GPU or RAM upgradability its days were numbered. MPX was supposed the be the ecosystem of the future but went nowhere.
I wish the Mac Studio was more upgradable. And I’ll miss buying Macs that don’t seem disposable. I’m already not sure how much RAM I should get in a Mac Studio. It’s a balance between being locked in to what you choose, and now treating the machine as something you’re not going to keep long term.
Key pre-trash Mac Pro features for me:
- Hard drive bays
- Expandable RAM
- Lots of ports, including audio
- Under the desk
- Affordable! Starting at $2500
Mac Studio is affordable, but it lacks the other features. (Its ports are fewer in number and kind.)
I’m pretty sad about the death of the Mac Pro. I owned a 2009 Mac Pro and it lasted a decade (upgraded everything). I stopped using it only because it got damaged. I didn’t get another because in early 2019, I couldn’t.
Between 2012 and 2017, every Mac Apple released was just “not for me” (a lifelong Mac user). This was right in the middle of macOS being neglected in favor of iOS and hardware felt it too.
If it wasn’t going to be great then I think it’s the right thing to retire it. One day maybe it’ll ride again.
To better days…
Let’s all come together as a community and help @siracusa through this difficult time.
RIP to a real one, but it’s time for us all to move on.
RIP Mac Pro
Previously:
