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Apple Confirms Mac Pro Is Dead, No Future Models Planned

Whew, when I first saw that beast and just knew it was destined for this - updates that either take forever or never come. Not like I could afford it anyway... but still sad to see the era go!
 
The Mac Pro should have died back in 2019. But it was always a small, vocal and admittedly pretty influential group of users who just couldn’t let go.

Apple Silicon just further reinforced this reality that the Mac Pro has no future in Apple’s PC roadmap. It’s the very antithesis of everything the Mac Pro stood for.

You really have to wonder what was going through Apple’s mind when they released the Mac Pro a year before announcing the M1 chip.
 
azentropy said:
Figured they were going to announce it at the same time as announcing the M5 Max and M5 Ultra Mac Studios, so timing is a bit odd.
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Why would they want the historical event of the end of an era overshadowing their new releases of products they want people to buy?

Announcing this on a Thursday after business hours makes perfect sense. People will mourn it for a couple of days, obit articles will be written for a week and then it’ll be gone from the news cycle.
 
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MacUserFella said:
Saw this coming from miles away, no one is paying a few extra thousands for PCIe ports
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Probably also due to higher storage, RAM and CPU prices due to AI supply vortex. The price of a new MP M5 would be insane considering the higher RAM tier Studio got discontinued as well.
 
BigJohno said:
Sad day for sure. Could be back in some form in the future but it's clear now, Apple wan't Mac Studio + Studio XDR as the future.
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I think it's the nail in the coffin for that Apple. The Apple that was cool and made great products.

They canceled the Mac Pro because they couldn't compete in that arena. It's not the most popular, but it was profitable and they *repeatedly* released Mac Pros that didn't meet the needs of its users. The horrible design of the trash can that they stuck with year after year despite knowing it was a mistake. The soldered memory when pros like to customize. The poor performance for price while also letting it lag behind their other chip generations

This was due to poor management, and it goes onto the pile of other mistakes Apple's been making
 
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The last true successor to the Powermac and my old beloved Quadra bites the dust.

I still rock a 12 core cMP that is on a currently supported OS, and love the versatility the classic towers gave us. Been eyeballing the last of the Intel models but with Apple being on their last Intel release, there really isn't the future my 2009 has enjoyed.

Mac Studio is neat, but sad to see one of the last true "pro" workstations die.
 
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maflynn said:
Yeah Apple Silicon largely killed off any and all advantages the Mac Pro had
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Yeah, but people seem to think this means Apple Silicon is so amazing, but it's actually because Apple Silicon is inflexible. The kind of buyer who'd spend a lot on a Mac Pro also wants to be able to upgrade their RAM and GPU. Plus the Mac Pro wasn't beating PCs of the same price point on speed

Apple Silicon is very fast for the performance and heat generated but it can be beaten by super hot CPUs by other companies and Apple didn't invest in making up for that. It was guaranteed to fail on the market due to Apple's inability to compete
 
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ipedro said:
Why would they want the historical event of the end of an era overshadowing their new releases of products they want people to buy?

Announcing this on a Thursday after business hours makes perfect sense. People will mourn it for a couple of days, obit articles will be written for a week and then it’ll be gone from the news cycle.
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Yep. The people who are mourning the end of an era are us, on an online forum. I’m sure lots of other people are doing the same, on other forums or closed Facebook groups.

But really, there’ll be little or no crossover into the far bigger iPhone / iPad / AirPod market.

Can’t see the death of the Mac Pro being a big deal to the TokTok / Reels / Instagram audience.

The sad truth is that the people who have strong memories of the Mac Pro and are emotionally / sentimentally attached to the Mac Pro brand are, um, “of a certain age” or above.

With all due respect, if the only Mac Pro a person had was an Apple Silicon Mac Pro, then I don’t understand why they bought it in the first place.

If you thought it was a good idea to own a lot more than four drive sleds at one time though, or you sneakily used the lower DVD drive compartment to stash something private, then …. Yeah 🙂
 
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platinumaqua said:
Apple Silicon architecture just wasn't compatible with the desktop tower ethos given the non-upgradeable memory and how it can't just take any third party M.2 SSD. I've seen this coming from a mile away.

Edit: and can't use a third party GPU in the pci-e slots
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I'm pretty sure Apple Silicon could easily use 3rd Party M.2. It's more that Apple doesn't want users to be able to upgrade their machines post purchase. And that's what's incompatible with the desktop tower ethos
 
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Hillstones said:
The comments are amusing. I bet not one person here owns the Apple Silicon version of the Mac Pro. That version of the Mac Pro was dead on day one. A $3,000 price hike over the Intel version, and the Apple Silicon version offered no RAM expansion, very very very limited PCIe card expansion options, no GPU upgrade options, and ridiculously overpriced SSD upgrade options, but only from Apple. The $1,999 Mac Studio was faster too. Since Apple Silicon does not allow GPU upgrades, the Mac Pro was pointless at $7,000. You knew it was doomed when Apple abandoned it with the M2 Ultra.

Apple Silicon is what killed the Mac Pro. The 2019 Intel Mac Pro offered RAM expansion, storage expansion, and you can throw pretty much any PCIe card in it and go, and upgrade the GPU as better cards became available. It offered everything that a minitower should offer. It fixed everything wrong with the 2013 Trashcan. But, Apple did jack up the price on that one too, starting at $5K. Twice as much as the previous Mac Pro, just for Jony Ive's design. The $800 wheels just proved how out of touch Jony Ive was with reality. Apple's best Pro desktops were the Power Mac G3, G4, G5, and 2006 to 2012 Intel Mac Pros. Apple Silicon Macs are blazing fast and efficient, but a big zero for expansion capabilities.
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I agree with you entirely, and I think we arrived here for a bunch of reasons. Including:

  1. For whatever reason, Apple's product management concluded that the target audience for the Mac Pro should have a very very specific use case, and decided at some point (let's say 2013) to cater to that use case, and ONLY that use case. Most of us agree that specific use case was professional video editing.
  2. They also decided that the customers of the Mac Pro cared so much about aesthetics that they'd pay thousands extra for a chassis designed like a Ferrari. $700 wheels, $1000 monitor stands, extremely expensive production methods. "Worth it" to the people who wanted a work of art on their desk.
  3. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro doesn't make any sense because the SoC architecture isn't designed with expansion in mind. They also felt that the target audience who WOULD want those things was so small that it wasn't worth the R&D money to build a Mac Pro that catered to their needs. Based on #1 and #2 I can't even blame them.
Apple missed out a lot because if they HAD continued to work with NVidia and supported CUDA and all of that, they wouldn't have missed out on a lot of business from professionals doing machine learning research. But that was what Apple wanted to do, for whatever reason.

At some point I decided to buy a Mac Studio, too. $1700 for the base model and a little bit down the line I spent $200 on an external SSD to have a reasonable amount of storage lol. Honestly it feels like Apple's design team is still too far up their own asses with these. These things are more than big enough to have a few m.2 nvme slots on the bottom, but someone at Apple decided that wasn't the right way to do things lol. Oh well.
 
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Hardly surprising, but sad nonetheless. Truly the end of an era.

Unfortunately, with the way Apple Silicon works, a Mac Pro just doesn't make sense anymore. I kept hoping that Apple would figure out a way to make a modular version of an Apple Silicon chip specifically for the Mac Pro so that you could at least expand RAM after the fact, and maybe even an Apple Silicon based dedicated GPU. Alas, that never came to fruition (nor, do I imagine, it was something Apple was even investigating), and thus we see the end of the once venerable Mac Pro.
 
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MacRumors said:
Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro and has removed the machine from its website, reports 9to5Mac. Apple said it does not plan to design a new version of the Mac Pro, and no new model will be coming in the future.
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Dang, that's shame......
MacRumors said:
The Mac Pro's downfall started in 2013 when Apple introduced a radical cylindrical design that turned out to be a major mistake. The Mac Pro's components were mounted around a central thermal dissipation core and cooled with a single fan that pulled air from under the case, through the core, and out of the top of the machine. It was quiet, but not efficient.
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No, the REAL downfall started when Apple decided to cancel the "Extreme" Apple Silicon lineup that was aimed at super pro users that would use the Mac Pro, and the justified $6K price tag...... At that point the writing was on the wall, Apple has decided to focus more on Mac Studio.......

Unfortunately Mac Studio is still BYODKM, Mac Pro offered Keyboard and Mouse included. If I wanted BYODKM, I would've gotten a Mac Mini instead with Pro chip.
 
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noraa said:
Hardly surprising, but sad nonetheless. Truly the end of an era.

Unfortunately, with the way Apple Silicon works, a Mac Pro just doesn't make sense anymore. I kept hoping that Apple would figure out a way to make a modular version of an Apple Silicon chip specifically for the Mac Pro so that you could at least expand RAM after the fact, and maybe even an Apple Silicon based dedicated GPU. Alas, that never came to fruition (nor, do I imagine, it was something Apple was even investigating), and thus we see the end of the once venerable Mac Pro.
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I'm sure they could've but they don't really care about the Mac anymore so it's not surprising they didn't. I think this is the beginning of the end for the Mac entirely
 
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Wow, end of an era. I used Mac Pros all the way from the G4 to the trashcan, which I loved, but it really was basically a glorified Cube. The last offerings were far too expensive for what they offered in light of Apple Silicon, IMO.

That said, I love my Mac Studio, In some ways it's the best Mac I've ever had, though I agree about speedy internal components. Looking forward to the next iteration, though, and it's nuts what even a modern Mac Mini is capable of, too.
 
Happy_John said:
They’re a bit bug for a desk the ornament.

But yeah, I really want a 7,1, just to have, but I guess I’ll wait until no wants theirs and are selling it cheap.
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I've kept my old Sawtooth G4 on a shelf in my home office, another design classic. (I removed the motherboard battery some years ago, just to be on the safe side).
 
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GuilleA said:
They should have manufactured a chip similar to the Mx Ultra series but only with GPU and Neural Engine cores and 128/256 GB or RAM. Slap it on a PCIe card and be able to run 2 or 3 in tandem. Bang! Your own local LLM beast.
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This is basically what they did with TB5 and RDMA with the studios though, and because they dont need to make anything special it’s a lot cheaper
 
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