Apple has carved up its computing range into a four square matrix. It has desktops and laptops, and consumer and pro products. This has been the case since 1997 when Steve Jobs drastically slashed the number of different Apple products. And the Mac Pro sat on the peak of the pro desktop mountain. But that is no longer the case. The Mac Pro has been abandoned.
When Jobs returned he slashed the number of products in Apple’s range leaving it with just this.
Today, it looks more like this.
But the Mac Studio, introduced in 2022, changed the equation. it can do almost everything the Mac Pro can. However, it lacks the expandability that differentiated the Mac Pro. But the Mac Studio has usurped the Mac Pro in terms of performance.
The Mac Pro has not been updated since June 2023. While the Apple M2 Ultra chip that powers it is capable of high-end graphics and AI applications, it now languishes behind the far more powerful Mac Studio with its M3 Ultra and M4 Max processors.
And with Apple seemingly on an annual update cycle with each generation of the M-series chips, that puts the Mac Pro almost in the abandoned product category. Even the Mac mini has surpassed it in many ways.
Apple seems to have a way to update existing products to accommodate new versions of Apple Silicon. The MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini and Mac Studio have all had Apple Silicon updates without major changes in their form factor. Apple has not done the same with the Mac Pro suggesting that it doesn’t see the Mac Pro as a significant product.
With a full maxed out Mac Pro costing almost $20,000, it’s hard to see anything more than a very small niche market for this device. Thunderbolt 5 and faster M-series processors mean external storage expansion and high performance for a variety of applications means even a current Mac mini can out-perform a Mac Pro at many tasks for a fraction of the cost.
Vale Mac Pro.
Anthony is the founder of Australian Apple News. He is a long-time Apple user and former editor of Australian Macworld. He has contributed to many technology magazines and newspapers as well as appearing regularly on radio and occasionally on TV.