The Mac Studio getting an update after just over a year? That's good, in isolation.
What's less good is what this implies for the Mac Pro. I think Gurman's earlier reporting made sense: that the Studio and Pro would follow a tick-tock cycle. M1 Studio, M2 Pro, M3 Studio, etc. If they're doing an M2 Studio, I think that means the M2 Pro isn't coming.
Which, I get it: it's quite an engineering puzzle to make their SoC approach work for such an expandable machine. But the problem is that you can never really trust Apple that there will be another Mac Pro at all. Will it be like the 2013 Pro again? Probably not; the Studio already exists. So then will they not do it at all? Will they do one very five years?
Consider this: They could at this point have upgraded the 2019 Mac Pro’s CPU twice. They never have (some components such as the GPU got occasional new options).
Upgrade the W-3275M (205W, $7,453) to the w7-2495X (225W-270W, $2,189), and
• single-core perf goes up 52%
• multi-core perf goes up 60%
Now, an M2 Ultra will already do even better (the M1 Ultra has 73% better single-core and 70% better multi-core), but migrating to that clearly presents a bigger engineering challenge. Do you make the memory non-unified? Do you make it hybrid, where some apps use on-package memory and others use slot memory? Do you add support for non-integrated graphics?