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Apple's Last M4 Mac: What's Rumored for the Mac Pro

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Across 2024 and the early months of 2025, Apple refreshed all of its Macs with next-generation M4 chips, with the exception of the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro is still waiting for an update, but it is supposed to get an overhaul later this year.

Mac-Pro-Feature-Teal.jpg

M-Series Chip

The current version of the Mac Pro can be purchased with Apple's M2 Ultra chip, which came out in June 2023. It might seem logical for the Mac Pro to get the equivalent M4 chip, the M4 Ultra, but it turns out Apple might not have an M4 Ultra in the works.

When the Mac Studio was updated earlier this month, Apple announced a version with the M4 Max chip, and a version with an M3 Ultra chip, with no M4 Ultra unveiled. Apple told Mac Studio reviewers that not every generation of M-series chips will include a higher-end "Ultra" tier, so there may simply be no M4 Ultra that exists for the Mac Pro.

There's now a question over what chip Apple will use in the Mac Pro, and there are a few possibilities.
  1. Apple does have an M4 Ultra chip coming, and it's not ready yet.
  2. There's some version of a high-end M4 chip that is not technically an "Ultra" chip and is instead called something else like "M4 Extreme."
  3. The Mac Pro will use the M3 Ultra chip.
  4. The Mac Pro will get an M5 Ultra chip.
The M1 Ultra, M2 Ultra, and M3 Ultra chips that Apple has released have essentially been two Max chips linked together through an "UltraFusion" connector. The M4 Max does not have the UltraFusion connector available, so the first possibility seems unlikely.

Apple could be making an M4 Ultra or Extreme chip that is standalone and not a doubled up variant of the M4 Max, but Bloomberg's Mark Gurman recently claimed that Apple doesn't want to create an M4 Ultra chip from scratch because of costs, production challenges, and low sales of high-end and expensive machines.

Apple could refresh the Mac Pro with the same M3 Ultra chip that it put in the Mac Studio, but if that's Apple's plan, it's likely the company would have just refreshed the Mac Pro alongside the Mac Studio. The Mac Pro could be held back for other development reasons, but there aren't really rumors of notable new features coming.

We might be getting the first Macs with M5 chips later this year, but there's also a chance M5 Macs won't come until early 2026. Even if Macs with M5 chips do launch in late 2025, there's no guarantee that an Ultra version of the chip will be ready to go.

As of right now, there's no clear indication of what's in store for the 2025 Mac Pro's Apple silicon chip.

Design

There aren't rumors of design updates for the next Mac Pro, so it's not likely that Apple has anything planned.

Ports

Apple added Thunderbolt 5 to the Mac Studio and MacBook Pro, so the Mac Pro will likely get Thunderbolt 5 ports too. Thunderbolt 5 will allow for more high-resolution displays to be connected to the Mac Pro.

RAM and SSD

The M3 Ultra chip supports up to 512GB RAM, so if the Mac Pro gets the M3 Ultra or something similar, it will support a lot more RAM. The current model is limited to 192GB.

Storage maximums will also double, as the M3 Ultra supports up to a 16TB SSD, while the Mac Pro is limited to 8TB.

Launch Date

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said last year that the Mac Pro will see a refresh toward the end of 2025, but given the chip uncertainty, Apple could be planning to hold it until 2026.

Article Link: Apple's Last M4 Mac: What's Rumored for the Mac Pro
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/20/mac-pro-2025-rumors/
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M3 Ultra, oooooh, I can't wait! I wonder what the up-charge would be if I wanted a base M4 instead?
 
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I'm clearly not the target market for a Mac Pro but, if they best they have to offer right now is M3 Ultra, it would surely make more sense to wait until they have something else ready to go - say, the M5 Ultra (given there's no M4 Ultra).

I'm guessing the Mac Pro audience is rather small and if some of that audience thinks they can get away with a Studio, they will, making the market even smaller.

The Mac Pro surely needs a more significant selling hook than just "it's in a box with more air than the Studio".
 
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The Mac Pro is in conflict with Apple's current mission to lock everyone in. The idea of the Mac Pro originally was to give power users the ability to have some sort of after-market upgradability using standard components. Upgrading RAM, using your own SSDs, inserting your own PCIe devices like GPUs or sound cards or whatever else. All of this is exactly what Apple has been moving away from with soldering everything into the chip.

I don't see the Mac Pro living on, at least not in its current form, for much longer.
They'll probably try to release some sort of trash can version again where things are locked down, which will flop (because it's not the intended audience, if you want a locked down one you can just buy the Studio), and then just cancel the whole thing.
 
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Acidsplat said:
As long as Hollywood and video/music production studios exist, there's a market for the Mac Pro.
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Most if not all actual professional studios billing clients for development and production use AMD Threadripper CPU and Nvidia GPU because time is money. The Mac Pro is targeted towards individual content creators creating content for social media or streaming services. With the shine on Apple fading, that market is also shrinking…
 
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JSRinUK said:
I'm clearly not the target market for a Mac Pro but, if they best they have to offer right now is M3 Ultra, it would surely make more sense to wait until they have something else ready to go - say, the M5 Ultra (given there's no M4 Ultra).

I'm guessing the Mac Pro audience is rather small and if some of that audience thinks they can get away with a Studio, they will, making the market even smaller.

The Mac Pro surely needs a more significant selling hook than just "it's in a box with more air than the Studio".
Click to expand...
I doubt they'll sell many of these. The Ultra has always been a terrible value. This year, even more so, while new Windows Nvidia solutions are jumping in where Apple has been lazily just wallowing and slapping each other silly with these "high-end" albatrosses.
 
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A Mac Pro with non-upgradable RAM and a non-upgradable main SSD... What a joke! Yet there will still be many people who will defend that blatantly illogical decision by Tim Cook.

In the name "Mac Pro," the "Pro" stands for "professional." How is a computer with soldered RAM and a soldered main SSD considered a professional product?
 
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picpicmac said:
2) The DGX Workstation looks sweet but will be more than a couple of M3 Ultras in price.
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And it's limited to 288 GB VRAM. So up that point it should run LLMs much faster than an 512 GB M3 Ultra, but for larger models the Ultra remains superior (unless you do 2 x DGX).

Interestingly, two Studios can be networked to give double the available RAM, so potentially 1 TB. I don't know what the performance loss would be from the network connection, but TB5 helps with that.

A more financially comparable comparision would be 2 x 128 GB Project DIGITS ($6,000 total if reports are to be believed) vs. a 256 GB M3 Ultra with 80 GPU cores ($7,100).
 
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If it doesn’t have an M5 Ultra chip then what is the point of it? It is meant to be the flagship model, and as they put the M4 chip in the iPad first, you cannot dictate which device will get the latest M chip first anymore. So it is entirely possible they launch a new Pro in the summer with the M5 Ultra in it.
 
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If they can’t go Extreme, it probably isn’t worth buying anyways. Now, give me an M5 Extreme not interconnected but all in one package, and 1TB of unified memory and it’s an instant buy for me. Just bought the M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM. Really wish this is what I had instead.
 
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JohnC1959 said:
There's pretty much only one reason which is a good one for those that need it. It's the only Mac that can take add in boards for special purposes.
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Yeah, you're referring to the PCIe slots. Those are especially useful for those who have specialty PCIe audio and video cards, which they can simply plug into the MP.

Plus you can add extra TB ports with a PCIe card.

At least with the M2, if you add everything up, you get nearly double the total I/O bandwidth from the MP vs. the Studio Ultra. Not sure what the ratio will be with the new MP.
 
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I'm one of those few people who have a 2019 Mac Pro with maxed out MPX modules and just recently a base 2025 Studio M3 Ultra. I've was using the Mac Pro for 3D rendering and whilst I have a PC with a couple of Nvidia cards and it's quicker than both of the Macs, I just prefer using Mac OS.

The fact is those, this studio runs rings around the MacPro for straight performance. It also generates way less heat and is silent, noting my PC can claim. Yeah there are still some speciality audio cards but the majority of audio interfaces are still USB-C, there are only a few Thunderbolt interfaces. PCIe audio are pretty scarce.

Blow are my results. Unless they come out with some M4/M5 Ultra/Extreme chip with PCIe slots I can't see the point of it as much I hate to say it.

2019 MacPro with 2x 6800XT Duo's
Self Build PC with 1914900KF + 4070 Ti Super + A4000
Mac Studio M3 Ultra Base 28cpu/60gpu

Redshift Benchmark:
MacPro: 2:30
Studio: 2:03
PC: 1:37

Cinebench Multicore CPU
MacPro : 1169
Studio: 2666
PC: 2016

Rendering an actual scene in Cinema 4D and Redshift. The scene has a lot of translucent objects, think trees, grass etc so not the easiest thing to render. Output was at 3000px X 3000px.

Mac Studio 19:12 RTX ON
Mac Pro 2019 41:48
Windows 11 + 4070 Ti Super 14:58
Windows 11 + 4070 Ti Super + A4000 10:21
 
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What does it get next you ask?

KTiFX0h.gif


"The M4 Max doesn't have an uLtRaFuSioN connector". -Some clown at Apple HQ.
 
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