MP All Models So long, old friend.

[Lounge vibes 05]

A Macbook Pro or Air is what they can afford.

The top of the line MacBook Pro is almost $8,000. What are you talking about?
A current top-of-the-line MacBook Pro is more expensive than even a mid range 2023 MacPro.
Now we are just saying things.
And if price was the only factor that made a halo product, then the $11,500 top-of-the-line 2023 Mac Pro is still beaten by… checks notes… the $17,000 rose gold Apple Watch from 2015.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

I understand that the tower design absolutely has its fans, and the upgrade ability is absolutely a benefit to many many people who are going to miss it, and it’s truly a shame that these people don’t have an actual replacement option.
But some of these comments and arguments are truly absurd.
If it’s not “Apple silicon computers aren’t real computers”, now it’s “the MacBook Pro is only a halo product because younger people can’t afford a MacPro”. What are we even doing here?
You can be disappointed that a product that you had use for is going away, whilealso admitting that the world, and apple themselves, have dramatically changed since 2006. It should not be a shock that a computer with a tower design that in most ways dates back to the mid 90s isn’t as impressive as it once was, or isn’t the thing that gets people to pull out the wallets.

 

[Arctic Moose]

A halo product is a company’s standout or flagship item that boosts the image and sales of its other products.

I would argue that the original iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and to a lesser extent the titanium PowerBook, are Apple’s halo products.

 

[Tyler O'Bannon]

I think that Mac Studio + Thunderbolt 5 for adapters is all people need now. Expandability with ram and ssd and all is done, so just getting adapters makes a lot more sense now. It will be missed tho

 

[frou]

A sizeable number of Mac Pro enthusiasts don't spend any money, just obsess about dirt-slow 5,1 clunkers 😀

 

[avro707]

A good number did spend big money on newer Mac Pros. There are some seriously expensive machines bringing run by people here and purchased new.

And if price was the only factor that made a halo product, then the $11,500 top-of-the-line 2023 Mac Pro is still beaten by… checks notes… the $17,000 rose gold Apple Watch from 2015.

Check the new prices on the ones I run. Prices of a nice new car.

 

[zephonic]

<deleted, not worth it>

 

[flowrider]

Truth is, even in 2023 the Mac Pro offered no performance advantage over the Mac Studio with the same processor.

That was the writing on the wall. It made the Mac Pro look clunky, cumbersome and redundant.

You are right about performance, but it offers internal expansion👍🏻 Mine contains nine internal SSDs and a PCI card with more USB ports.

Lou

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

I would argue that the original iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and to a lesser extent the titanium PowerBook, are Apple’s halo products.

Huh, I don’t really get where you are going with that. Maybe particular models of them.
The iPod classic, at least for a short period, could be considered the halo product of the iPod line. The most expensive, best storage, best sounding. Technically the iPod Mini and later Nano were always the best selling models until the touch, they are the models that took the iPod from selling 1 million units in 18 months to over a hundred million units between 2005 and 2007 alone, but the iPod classic was the one that was the leader and the most technically impressive, again at least until the touch.
I think the iPad Pro is another fantastic example, the most popular iPad is the base but the Pro is a technological masterpiece.

 

[zephonic]

You are right about performance, but it offers internal expansion👍🏻 Mine contains nine internal SSDs and a PCI card with more USB ports.

Lou

Nice! Yeah, it's cleaner to have that ITB than with a bunch of externals.

But I couldn't get over the $3K premium that commanded, and by then I feared the Mac Pro was gonna be a dead end street.


Maybe, just maybe, if John Ternus indeed takes over as CEO, we may see Apple change their Mac roadmap. But at this point, I really doubt that.

Apple clearly views industrial strength computing as a task for anonymous blades in an anonymous data center, not something the end user should be bothered with.

 

[257Loner]

I'd love to take a tour of a major movie studio or some other place where the Mac Pro sees heavy use. Real world use, not just running things in the corner. Always wanted one so I want to see what they're capable of.

The cameras on iPhone Pros are now more utilized by movie studios than Macs are.

 

[teh_hunterer]

A halo product is an expression of the current state of the art. In this case, it's the biggest, baddest, fastest, most powerful machine you know how to make. The Mac Pro is, and always has been the halo product. What is it now - a damn studio? 🤣

A desktop tower in 2026 is not Apple's halo product. Not sure if you've been in an Apple store lately but nobody gathers around the Mac Pro that's on display.

When the M2 version came out the reaction was pretty much "why does this thing exist when it's not any faster than the Studio?".

 

[Elusi]

What pci cards do you use?

Personally I don't run Mac for desktop, other than occasionally docking the Macbook. My PC has GPU, blackmagic I/O, NVMe-cards and ironically enough a thunderbolt controller card added through PCIe. But I wasn't thinking for my own use.

In my industry I encounter many Mac Pros still. Primarily in audio but also in DIT stations. All I/O added can of course be added through thunderbolt, but it's just such a messy solution especially in DIT where you want to minimize the modular junk as you're going to move around a lot.

A more basic Mac Pro with just the PCIe added and no frills beyond that would have been wonderful. (And I don't mean like with the M2 Mac Pro where they kept the old beautiful but expensively made case and weird assembly-line decisions that made its price ridiculous..)

 

[teh_hunterer]

From Apple's point of view, though, would it make any (real) money? They'd be selling in tiny numbers compared to e.g. HP and Lenovo. Unlike with Windows PCs, these machines would share nothing hardware-wise with the rest of the Apple ecosystem. Nvidia / AMD Windows GPU drivers are common to swathes of PCIe cards, from budget to workstation. This effort would need to be done just for a handful of Mac Pros. There's no iMacs or MBPs using them anymore.

This is the crux of it really. Because of that, there is simply no future for third party GPUs and macOS. There would need to be a healthy ecosystem of these GPUs in the entire Mac lineup for it to get proper driver and software support. Without that, there's pretty much no point.

I don't think this means Apple is abandoning pros though. Apple plans to offer a compelling alternative to NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, which I think they are well on track to doing with the "fusion architecture" they just unveiled, that lets them make a GPU as big as they want. Previously they've been hitting the brick wall that comes with having to make two perfect dies and mash them together to make ultra chips. It's just too expensive and put a hard limit on how big they can make a GPU. That's gone now.

It might suck right now for those heavily into PCIe expansion, but PCIe slots on a motherboard isn't strictly necessary. As the industry shifts, thunderbolt expansion will get better and more widespread support from manufacturers who realise they need to go that way to follow the market.

Apple is the first company to really push SoCs in real computers, but they won't be the last.

 

[Arctic Moose]

I think the iPad Pro is another fantastic example, the most popular iPad is the base but the Pro is a technological masterpiece.

It is a fantastic product, but it is no halo product.

Nobody has purchased an iPad Pro as their first Apple product, and then went out and bought an iPhone, an Apple Watch, AirPods, an Apple TV and a Mac because they liked it so much.

However, for iPhones (and iPods before them) it happens all the time.

Apple: The best example of Halo Effect - The Strategy Story

How Apple sells higher-priced products by building an affinity for its lower-priced product. The psychological effect is Halo Effect. Why Apple is the best example?

thestrategystory.com

 

[davidec]

I am grateful that Apple announced it as we can move on and prepare. No point in keeping that one secret from a commercial and user convenience POV. Onwards and upwards (or downwards) have always loved a delivery of a new tower and the most recent was my favourite.

 

[kwikdeth]

What is love would be if apple or somebody else upgraded the 7,1 firmware to allow silver/gold etc cpus. Same socket, only needs the firmware to run them. Second hand W-xeons are utter highway robbery.

 

[trusso]

Was Apple right to retire the Mac Pro? No. They neutered it and drove the price up obscenely high, and then used that as justification to cancel it.

Was the writing on the wall? Yes.

If Apple really cared about making insanely great computers, there would always be an expandable professional tower in their lineup, simply as a statement against other PC manufacturers. But while I'll freely admit the the M-series serves 99% of consumer needs, Apple (with their hardware and their software) has continually ceded the professional ground until there's none left for them. The crime here is that, in many cases, Apple's hardware or software served a need that no one else could match, and so by completely abandoning the space, Apple is doing more than just giving up a market; they are leaving long-time power users high-and-dry. These same power users who were long evangelists for the company are now speaking out against it. Apple is so filthy rich they don't even care, but if this is a canary in the coal mine, it will matter eventually.

 

[teh_hunterer]

they are leaving long-time power users high-and-dry. These same power users who were long evangelists for the company are now speaking out against it

What can these power users no longer do though?

If it's GPU power, I expect Apple's new 'fusion' architecture to allow them to make big enough GPUs to compete.

If it's PCIe expansion, I would expect more of these critical expansion devices to make thunderbolt options as the market shifts. You can also go thunderbolt to PCIe if you truly need to, as thunderbolt can tunnel PCIe.

It's only a matter of time until more of the industry shifts to SoCs with baked on memory instead of socketed CPU/GPU and memory sticks. This isn't going to be just Apple, this is going to be everyone, and the truly professional grade stuff that is currently PCIe-only will simply need to switch over to thunderbolt eventually.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

What can these power users no longer do though?

If it's GPU power, I expect Apple's new 'fusion' architecture to allow them to make big enough GPUs to compete.

If it's PCIe expansion, I would expect more of these critical expansion devices to make thunderbolt options as the market shifts. You can also go thunderbolt to PCIe if you truly need to, as thunderbolt can tunnel PCIe.

It's only a matter of time until more of the industry shifts to SoCs with baked on memory instead of socketed CPU/GPU and memory sticks. This isn't going to be just Apple, this is going to be everyone, and the truly professional grade stuff that is currently PCIe-only will simply need to switch over to thunderbolt eventually.

There’s also the idea that Apple could always introduce accessories for the Mac Studio to expand its capability. These already exist third-party, but Apple could always design some of their own, and even make the design of them some type of a nod to the old MacPros if they truly wanted to.
They have sold $1000 display stands before, I don’t think anything is stopping them from selling a $2000 Mac Studio thunderbolt 5 enclosure with space for PCIE, although it would be quite limited.
Still, that basically gives back 90% of the expansion of the 2023 MacPro without them having to update it every several years. Just swap out the Studio M5Ultra for an M7Ultra and so on every couple of years and there you go.
I don’t actually think they would do this, but it would be a brilliant move on their part.
There’s also the fact that Apple has added the ability to use the power of several Mac Studios connected together in macOS 26.2 back in December and I could absolutely see them taking advantage of this with some type of enclosure that could hold several Mac Studios with Ultra chips together.

 

[Charlie Bonesx]

It won't run ray-tracing only games like Doom: The Dark Ages or Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, though, nor Vulcan-only games like Doom Eternal, CS2 or Portal 2

thanks for that clarification

 

[boswald]

The cameras on iPhone Pros are now more utilized by movie studios than Macs are.

Fair point, but still want to see one in the wild.

 

[avro707]

What is love would be if apple or somebody else upgraded the 7,1 firmware to allow silver/gold etc cpus. Same socket, only needs the firmware to run them. Second hand W-xeons are utter highway robbery.

That would be useful. Although my two machines already have the top CPUs - but they were very, very expensive to configure like that.

Given we are unlikely to see any ability to use more modern GPUs in MacOS, I doubt anyone will be able to tweak the firmware to allow the other Xeon, though I'll be glad to eat my proverbial hat if it ever does.

 

[Howard2k]

Apple Silicon isn’t as capable as Intel. And now Intel has matched it for performance per watt. PCs run circles around MacBooks for battery life and have better performance to boot. Steve Jobs would never have abandoned Intel or the Mac Pro. But at least Apple has a $600 toy with 8GB RAM for professionals.

Lol

 

[impulse462]

The cameras on iPhone Pros are now more utilized by movie studios than Macs are.

Respectfully, you are so off base here, i have to know what makes you think this.