Not sure why Apple has shown deliberate neglect for the Pro,
largely that is a 'two way street' . the Mac Pro forums/thread regular have folks chime on on how they bought a 2-3 year old Mac Pro and made it work just fine with some commodity parts replacements. They don't buy new Mac Pros. That pragmatically makes them non Apple customers (they don't hand money to Apple). There are a few that might buy direct refurbished, but not in large numbers.
Likewise even the direct buyers have a fairly substantial subset of only buying every 6-10 years. So Apple is selling in those intermediate years to who? Say collective pool of Mac Pro users is 800K and they are spread evebkt out over that 8-ish year timespan. That only gives them 100K per year buying new.
Supposedly the Apple Vision Pro is a 'giant flop' because it only sold about 300-400K a year. Three (or four) times that number.
Longer cycle buys of new equipment lead to longer cycle delivery of new systems.
like at least throw processor bumps in, a Mac Pro with M5 Ultra would be a bone at least to creatives to use,
Apple SoCs typically have 'hand me down' products to continue to sell them into. When the MBP 14"/16" dumped the M3 Max then Studio got the M3 Utlra (***) . the M2 Ultra got dumped relatively quickly from the Mac Studio... where does that get the 'hand me down' to? Pragmatically the Mac Pro.
' Folks hand wave that the iPhone churning every year and not fully pay attention to that chip NOT being dumped every year. The iPhone continues to be sold for at least two more years. Apple then passes it along to other products like entry iPad or AppleTV.
Similarly now that Apple has gone to making different sized dies for. Axx and Axx Pro the Pro chip is now going to fall into low costs Macs after spends just a single year in iPhone Pro model (that 'dies' every year).
The Ultra class chips have far more higher upfront R&D costs and yet Apple is going to toss them in the garabage can every 12 months. Probably not. The higher R&D costs (coupled to relatively low volumes ) is much more likely going to lead to longer lifecycles ; not shorter ones. Hence Apple dropping hints that "Ultra" many not show up every generation. There is large economics behind that. Intel, AMD, Nvidia don't dump large chips in the trash can every 12 months. There might be a new hype train chip every 12 months but the replacement isn't dumped.
there is a dual edge sword with Apple silicon only having one 'client' (Apple products). The number of Apple products is small. The general trend of Apple dumping sales of pervious gen with the newest gen pragmatically makes that list of eligible systems for deployment much smaller.
The old Xeon W chips in the Mac Pro lived off a subset of the larger. Xeon server market. That chip didn't pay for itself in the Intel land. ( Neither does Threadripper in AMD Epyc land.). the Intel Mac Pro largely lived off of a very large group of non Mac Pro users paying for the R&D. Once decoupled from those non-users then have very real issues.
Hand waving continuing Intel Mac Pro also ignores the huge shared R&D costs being paid on software (and hardware ) side by the rest of the Mac ecosystem which as moved on. Nobody paying for Intel code development/maintenance R&D means it doesn't get done eventually.
My concern about apple truly ditching the creatives openly is the halo effect, yes the middle tier creatives are served just fine by current consumer level Macs (I edit video just fine on my M4Max MBP with 128GB of RAM) but the heavy weight guys (like say movie SFX studios)
heavyweight SFX studios don't edit video. Once rendered it is not any particularly harder to do than video captured by a camera.
AI SFX slop is being produced at a way higher volume than the narrow heavyweight SFX houses could every do. That isn't where the edit volume is. And that is a much bigger halo , hype train.
are going to switch over to PC workstations (and switching isn't as hard as it used to be), where all their PCIe cards work, they can upgrade their machines ad nauseam and that halo effect will lose. It's similar to why Chevy and Ford produce halo editions of their Corvette and Mustang that are way up there in price, in tiny volumes too. Sure they are a side hustle almost, but they are a halo to the brand.
How many of these halo cars have saved GM, Chrysler , Ford. from Government bailouts when they got in trouble? The Mustang got canned before for being brought back to help push a new EV vehicle.
The 'halo' effect is grossly overblown on these boards. It has no where near the effect folks hand wave at it say it does.
Intel selling $6K server CPUs doesn't not significantly improve placement in the general PC laptop market if do not have a very good laptop SoCS for those systems. Intel had deficient laptop SoCs and Apple completely
dropped them. What products you have in the appropriate product segments matters more. None of those USA muscle car vendors sell more cars than Toyota does. How many bailouts done for Toyota?
*** There are indications that the M3 Max that the laptops used is not the same base Max used for the Ultra. Millions of laptops have zero need for a UltraFusion connector. If the M3 Max die was already excessively large and difficult to make... incrementally bigger would not particularly make any economic sense. 'Halos' don't pay fab bills.
There is a major economic difficultly with try to slap together two large chips as very chunky chiplets. There is also probably tension in making the GPU clusters large and allocating the additional PCI-e headers that a Mac Pro needs for creditable/competitive PCI-e backhaul. Unless Apple makes major change to how they construct something like the Ultra it won't be viable to chuck them into trash at the same pace as the rest of the SoC dies they are doing.
