Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple's Last M4 Mac: What's Rumored for the Mac Pro
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Maybe the compact design of the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra cannot be extended to the design of the Mac Pro. It shares the Unified Memory part of the motherboard with the Mac Studio, so it's a question of storage, which doesn't seem like a real problem. I suspect it's the PCIe bus. The 2023 Mac Pro (with M2 Ultra chip) features seven PCIe slots: two double-wide full-length x16 Gen4 slots, two double-wide full-length x8 Gen4 slots, two single-wide full-length x8 Gen4 slots, and one single-wide half-length x4 Gen3 slot preconfigured with the Apple I/O card. I imagine Apple is working on a future model with Gen 5.0 slots. We only really got PCIe 5.0 motherboards in the hands of customers in 2024.
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.
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.
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 does have an M4 Ultra chip coming, and it's not ready yet.
- 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."
- The Mac Pro will use the M3 Ultra chip.
- The Mac Pro will get an M5 Ultra chip.
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
PCIe 5.0 is twice as fast as PCIe 4.0, with a maximum data transfer rate of 32 GT/s (gigatransfers per second), a maximum unidirectional bandwidth of 64 GB/s (gigabytes per second), and a maximum bidirectional bandwidth of 128 GB/s.
For reference, maximum speed and bandwidth implies that one is dealing with a x16 slot, the largest and fastest PCIe slot available.
The maximum data transfer rate shows how fast data can be transferred in each PCIe lane. The number of lanes depends upon the slot size: x1 slots have one lane, x4 slots have four lanes, x8 slots have eight lanes, and x16 slots have 16 lanes.
To get the peak data transfer rate, you must multiply the number of lanes by the maximum data transfer rate.
For example, the peak data transfer rate of PCIe 4.0 with a x16 slot and a maximum data transfer rate of 16 GT per lane would be 256 GT/s, 16 lanes multiplied by 16 GT per lane; however, the peak data transfer rate for PCIe 5.0 with a x16 slot and a maximum data transfer rate of 32 GT per lane would be 512 GT/s, 16 lanes multiplied by 32 GT per lane.
This increased speed is beneficial because it allows computers to process more data and enables them to maximize the power of the latest GPUs or SEDs.
In addition, the increased bandwidth of PCIe 5.0 means that devices may be able to achieve the same throughput with fewer lanes, making more lanes available.
For example, a GPU that used to require 16 lanes to run at full speed may now be able to run at the same speed with 8, making 8 additional lanes available. This is important because CPUs provide a limited number of lanes, which need to be distributed among devices so that the CPU can communicate with each.
Finally, PCIe 5.0 aims to solve power delivery problems with current GPUs. The existing 8-pin connectors can only supply up to 150W each, with two or three connectors usually required. The new 16-pin PCIe 5.0 connector, however, will be able to deliver enough power for high-end graphics cards.
Maybe Apple is going to jump a generation and go for PCIe 6.0! Just as PCIe 5.0 is becoming commercially available, the PCI-SIG has already defined the next PCIe generation. The specification for PCIe 6.0 was just released in January of 2022, so it will take time for commercially available products to support PCIe 6.0.
Last edited:
Tim is happy to cater to niche users. Apple is regularly releasing exotic new emojis that I'm sure aren't used by the vast majority of Mac users. Some niches get a lot more love from Apple than others.
Please show us a definition of the word professional that mentions anything about ram or ssds
I mean the MacBook Pro and iPhone Pro but I get your point. Current Mac Pro is peak Tim Cook.
The RAM is part of the SoC, and on the Mac Pro, and the internal main storage is slotted and currently upgradeable in the same way the M4 Mac mini is.
still need to swtich pci-e out and swtich will need to be pcie-6. But an swtich fed by duel X16 v5 going to 64 v4 lanes can work.
I dunno. Does being a "professional" entail being able to swap out the ram, processor and storage in your main computer, or does it simply mean being good at your job (which does not necessarily entail being tech savvy)? I can be an experienced video editor working for a company, and yet never handled a single stick of ram before in my life.
Where Apple naming convention is concerned, "pro" seems like it just means "more than the base product". An iPhone pro has a better camera, an iPad Pro has a better screen, AirPods Pro has noise cancellation and hearing aid functionality, a MacBook Pro has better specs, and there's no reason to expect anything different from the Mac Pro.
You seem to be conflating the term "professional" with "enthusiast", ie: the "build your own PC" crowd. I don't need to be a serious video editor or musician to want to be able to buy the base spec Mac Pro and then upgrade it with the cheapest third party ram and storage I can find online. It just means I want to save money.
The Venn diagram for these two groups of users likely intersected more closely in the past, and are now moving further apart because even the base spec Macs are "good enough" for "professional work", however one chooses to define it. There is nothing stopping someone from speccing out the Mac model they want or need for their work. It just means they have to be prepared to pay for it. It will cost more upfront, but Macs do promise to quickly pay for themselves in the form of improved productivity and fewer issues overall.
You decide where your value proposition lies. Do you want to save money, or do you want to save time.
Just a minor clarification: Those are the peak bandwidths, not the peak data transfer rates. The latter are lower because of the encoding overhead, and how much lower depends on which encoding scheme you use.
E.g., with 242B/256B encoding, a 64 GB/s peak bandwidth gives a 60.5 GB/s peak data transfer rate.
Last edited:
That was when you could upgrade this computer.
Now its an overpriced Mac Studio in a full size tower.
This is the crux of it. No point for this thing to exist anymore when not allowing the after market upgradability it was intended to showcase in the Mac lineup.
I skimmed though this thread and did not immediately notice anyone mentioning that Apple are producing, for their own use, a server focused Apple chip that is not currently sold to their customers. This was mentioned in the annoucement of their $500B investment in the US. Is it not possible that this, as yet, unannounced chip is a possible candidate for a Mac Pro? A thought that may have no merit and is based on pure assumptions at this point.
AI. Running full LLM locally. Although, for over ten years I have been working on algorithmic computing for financial transactions - aka AI.
With MLX I believe you can link up to 4 of them. 2TB of RAM would let you fine-tune the full unquantized Deepseek model and If I was running some AI startup trying to make money off of the hype that’s immediately where I’d go with my money right now.
On-topic, I think the Mac Pro is coming but not for ~6-10 months. That said, Apple could do the stupid thing and release it with the M3 Ultra and I wouldn’t fully rule that out but I think they would have updated it already if that were the case. We’re going to get some $20k Apple Silicon spec’d machines within the next year IMO.
The new Nvidia DGX workstation has insanely fast HBM so even though the amount of memory is smaller if your work will fit into it, or you can chunk it, you can probably do some model training which is not really the case with the Mac Studio even linked up.
If Apple were smart they’d develop an interconnect protocol or adopt an existing one that’s faster than TB5 but I don’t see them doing that, but I’d love to be wrong.
Last edited:
Darth Tulhu
macrumors 68020
speaking of puppy, it could have some boston dynamics legs as an option
Seems like a natural fit for an ≈2026 MP would be PCIe 6.0. At x16, it offers a peak data transfer rate of 121 GB/s bidirectionally with 242B/256B encoding. That's 12x TB5's bidirectional peak of 80 Gb/s = 10 GB/s.
Because that is not what defines a professional product. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like those features too.
I suspect it would have upgradable SSD but I doubt RAM.
Ahhhhh… Nope. Depends on how well it can handle AI tasks. Effects, postprocessing, filtering. We will see more and more AI tools in this area.
The Mac Pro's primary storage is slotted, not soldered. And while you have to pay Apple's prices, that storage is upgradeable. From apple.com (ignore the LaCie):
Since it came out with Apple Silicon I dream of Apple Silicon compute cards which you can slide in to increase the (distributed) compute power manifold.