The Mac Pro Is, Quite Obviously, ‘On the Back Burner’, According to Mark Gurman ⇥ arstechnica.com

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

Long-suffering Mac Pro buyers may have taken heart when Apple finally added an M2 Ultra processor to the tower in mid-2023, making it one of the very last Macs to switch from Intel to Apple Silicon—surely this would mean that the computer would at least be updated once every year or two, like the Mac Studio has been? But Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that Mac Pro buyers shouldn’t get their hopes up for new hardware in 2026.

Gurman says that the tower is “on the back burner” at Apple and that the company is “focused on a new Mac Studio” for the next-generation M5 Ultra chip that is in the works. As we reported earlier this year, Apple doesn’t have plans to design or release an M4 Ultra, and the Mac Studio refresh from this spring included an M3 Ultra alongside the M4 Max.

This is as unsurprising as it is disappointing. There used to be a time when the high-end desktop Mac was expensive but attainable, with clear differentiation from the iMac and, later, Mac Mini. It was the one for computationally difficult work.

But the Apple Silicon era has granted high CPU capability — if not GPU performance — to computers across the lineup. If you believe benchmarks, the 2024 Mac Mini gets better CPU scores in single and multi-core than the best-performing Mac Pro from just one year earlier. (The Mac Pro gets way better GPU performance at least in part because it has sixty cores to the Mini’s twenty.) And, sure, that is one test; I am sure the Pro could run circles around the Mini if it were being used intensively all day long. Still, it shows just how fast Apple is moving with the standard Mx chips compared to the higher-spec variants.

The Apple Silicon era has also ended the era of expandability in the Mac. The Mac Pro shipping today is differentiated from the Studio by having an older chip, and a handful of limited PCI expansion slots. All this could be yours starting at nine thousand dollars in Canada. Nine grand!

I remember when this model was the Mac you saw in recording studios, editing bays, and science labs. Then it became the halo supercar in the lineup. Now? It feels like a bizarre collectible.