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Apple’s Mac Pro had no real raison d’être

MacDailyNews

Mar 30

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Apple's Mac Studio (left) and the now-defunct Mac Pro — Apple’s Mac Studio (left) and the now-defunct Mac Pro

The Mac Pro was already dead. Apple just made it official.

The high-end desktop’s slow demise began in 2022, when Apple quietly scrapped plans for a flagship chip with double the processing cores of its Ultra-series processors. Without that ultra-powerful silicon, the Mac Pro lost its last legitimate reason to exist — especially since the far smaller, cheaper, quieter, and more practical Mac Studio already delivered similar performance.

Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
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It was roughly three times larger in volume than the Mac Studio and cost $3,000 more — starting at a whopping $6,999. The approach to expansion also felt stuck in another era: There were PCIe slots for networking and audio cards, but no support for upgrading the components that matter most in modern workflows, like memory and graphics.
By last year, these deficiencies had become impossible to ignore. The Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra pulled further ahead — thanks to better performance, greater memory capacity and significantly higher storage ceilings. Notably, the Mac Pro wasn’t updated at all.
Apple also laid the groundwork for discontinuing the Mac Pro in other ways. That included an announcement last month that the Mac mini would be made in Houston. The Mac Pro had been the company’s only domestically assembled computer, so Apple was able to avoid headlines that it killed its sole made-in-America product (news that probably wouldn’t have gone over well at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.).

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MacDailyNews Take: In the end, Mac Pro was a waste of aluminum.

For the vast majority of professional users (video editors, photographers, 3D artists, developers, and those running AI/ML workloads) the Mac Studio is the superior choice overall. It delivers an excellent balance of performance, price, compact size, and modern features. The Mac Studio covers 90% (or more) of what the Mac Pro once offered, but at a fraction of the cost and with newer silicon, and the promise of regular updates. The discontinued Mac Pro was only preferable, or truly necessary, in the rare cases that demand heavy internal PCIe expansion that cannot be adequately handled externally via Thunderbolt; a very niche market. – MacDailyNews, March 27, 2026

Apple’s Mac Pro is a dead end. Mac Studio is the high-end Mac future now. Bring on the M5 Ultra Mac Studio and rename it “Mac Pro.” – MacDailyNews, November 17, 2025

R.I.P., Mac Pro.

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