If I had to guess, I’d say Apple sold less than 1,000 Mac Pros last year. Due to the long wait for Apple’s silicon, the advent of the Mac Studio, and a years-long absence of meaningful updates, Apple’s most expensive Mac has likely only been sold to Apple’s most desperate or uninformed buyers.

This should have changed this year. When John Turnus teased the Apple Silicon Mac Pro “one more day” at Apple’s Peek Performance event last March, he seemed to nod and wink at the most bizarre rumors of a machine vastly superior to the just-announced Mac Studio and its massive M1 Ultra chip. Fast forward 10 months and we are still waiting for the Apple Silicon Mac Pro to arrive.

The best bet would be the new Mac Pro arriving at WWDC, where the last three models debuted in 2006, 2013 and 2019. Apple loves to make a big splash with its Mac Pro, and the WWDC keynote is the perfect place to do just that with an audience of users ready and willing to spend $5,999 on a Mac “designed for professionals who needfinalin processor performance.

When the M1 Ultra brought a whopping 20-core CPU and 64-core GPU to Mac Studio, rumors swirled of an “extreme” chip with an insane 48 CPU cores and 152 GPU cores, more than twice as powerful as the older processor. end of Mac Studio. It will be the ultimate showcase of Apple Silicon’s power and the opening of a new generation of Mac Pros that has few, if any, peers.

However, while there is no doubt that the new Mac Pro will once again take its rightful place at the top of the Mac pyramid, the speed gains may not be nearly as impressive as previous models. A report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claims that Apple is ditching the Extreme workstation chip and will instead settle for a slightly boosted Ultra processor. It’s still fast, mind you, but the difference between it and Mac Studio – even if it stays with the M1 chip for another year – won’t be as big as we hoped.

So, if the Mac Pro isn’t the fastest Mac you can buy now, and the new model won’t be significantly faster when it launches later this year, why does it even exist?

identity crisis

According to Gurman’s report, the Mac Pro will feature a 24-core and 76-core GPU M2 Ultra processor, the same chassis design as the current model, and “slots” for storage, graphics, media, and network cards, but no memory . (It’s not entirely clear how the graphics extension will work with Apple’s system-on-a-chip, but Gurman previously reported that the Mac Pro will have “easy expandability for additional memory,” so it’s possible his source is wrong about graphics card support.) The extension. definitely important for a Mac Pro, but with Thunderbolt 40 Gb/s speed, internal upgrades aren’t that important anymore. And the lack of aftermarket RAM upgrades means that Apple doesn’t make Macs with user-upgradable memory.

But the main question is, what is the personality of the Mac Pro? Over the last decade or so, the Mac Pro has consistently been Apple’s most innovative and powerful desktop, from the charming but frustrating cylinder to the current model’s modern thermal architecture and $699 wheels. However, as Apple moved to silicon, the Mac Pro became less and less relevant and worthy of its price, and it is in desperate need of an upgrade that we assumed was on the way.

Willis Lai/Foundry

But if the new model is only slightly faster than the Mac Studio and slightly more expandable than, say, the MacBook Pro, it’s not really a Mac Pro, is it? In the course of Apple’s transition to silicon, Apple has already killed the iMac Pro and the 27-inch iMac without even saying goodbye, and the Mac Pro seems to fit the same logic: a holdover from an older era that doesn’t live up to its heritage. With the impressive design changes to the 24-inch iMac and MacBook Pro accompanying their new chips, I assumed that Apple’s first Mac Pro silicon would be something radical and revolutionary, and it would take years of development and proper introduction to complete the transition.

After all, that’s what a Mac Pro is should to be. If it’s not, I ask again, is this really a Mac Pro?

I used to think that Mac Studio was a temporary machine meant to fill in the gaps between Mac Pro updates, but now I’m not sure. I envisioned the Apple Silicon Mac Pro as nothing short of a breakthrough, with a new class of processors, a radical new form factor, and a new identity that would put it back on the map. Apple had the opportunity to impress us with the design and speed of the Mac Pro and take their MPX modules to the next level, but if that doesn’t happen, perhaps Mac Studio is all the professional Macs we need.

Assuming the Apple Silicon Mac Pro stays at $5,999 and is only about 30 percent faster than the top performing Mac Studio, it’s hard to see why anyone would spend another $1,000 on a larger case and internal expansion. Apple already sells the Mac Studio with “revolutionary performance, a wide range of peripheral connectivity options, and a modular system to create the perfect configuration,” so if the Mac Pro doesn’t bring a major jump in performance, design, and expandability, who needs both to exist?

We may never get that answer. Judging by the frequency of Mac Pro updates, the model that Apple released this year is likely to be relevant in three years. If Apple is hard to justify its existence now, what will it look like in 2026? If the rumors are true and Apple wanted the Mac Pro to be something more than what it really is, it might be better to just remove it from the lineup rather than keep its name and nothing else.

Mac Pro