Apple Finally Discontinues The Mac Pro
It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.
Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.
There is no meaningful difference in the state of play between today and June 2023, when the M2 Ultra Mac Pro was released. Even on release, it was considered extraneous given Apple also offered the Mac Studio with the exact same chip, in a significantly smaller case and at a lower price point. The situation has only gotten more dire in the intervening three years, where even Apple’s cheapest Macs leapfrogged the stagnant Mac Pro offering in performance.
The 2019 Mac Pro came out of the promises the company made at its reconciliatory press conference in 2017, with the intent of resetting the fractious relationship that had formed between it and high-end professional Mac users, especially Mac desktop customers. Not only was the then-current Mac Pro (the 2013 trashcan design) not being updated, the philosophy of the machine’s compact design was also at odds with what workstation buyers typically wanted; as much I/O as possible and lots of options for expansion. The rebuke of the ultra-minimalist 2016 MacBook Pro and growing discontent about the reliability issues of Mac’s new butterfly keyboards was also fuelling the negativity.
Apple used the 2017 roundtable chat to explain why the trashcan Mac Pro had been abandoned (they had hit a “thermal corner”) and promised a revamp. Indeed, the 2019 Mac Pro was exactly what people were asking for, albeit at eye-watering prices. However, Apple ended up repeating the exact same mistakes as the previous generation; it would never receive an update other than the belated switch to Apple Silicon.
Unfortunately, I think the 2019 revision slotted in at a very awkward moment in the Mac product roadmap. Work on ARM-based Macs ramped up internally in mid-2018, probably just after the designs for the new Mac Pro had been mapped out. And by the time it shipped, the first ARM Macs were less than a year away. It would take another year for the high-end M1 Pro and M1 Max chips to debut publicly, but even the M1 chip was running laps around the Intel Mac Pro in many workflows.
When Apple was designing the 2019 Mac Pro, the concept of a product like the Mac Studio probably wasn’t envisaged as a possibility. Nevertheless, I believe Apple had more ambitious ideas for the Mac Pro in the Apple Silicon era, but this work failed to pan out as they hoped. This is signposted by the fact that during the launch event for the Mac Studio in March 2022, presenter John Ternus went out of his way to tease that an update for the Mac Pro was still forthcoming. It is uncharacteristic of them to talk about anything regarding future products, but they did it here because they wanted to front-run the notion that the Mac Pro had been usurped, and that Apple’s highest-end customers should keep waiting to see what cool things they would do.
I think the intent was for Apple to launch a workstation M-series chip, something that could only be housed in the thermal envelope of the Mac Pro chassis. There were rumours at the time of a quad-Max chip, perhaps called the M2 Extreme. That never came to pass. It would take another year and a half for Ternus’ pledge to be realised, in the form of the utterly disappointing 2023 Apple Silicon Mac Pro that featured nothing new at all, offered wholly less expandability than its Intel predecessor, and ran on the exact same M2 Ultra chip as what the Mac Studio offered.
You might as well have dug the gravestone then. I’m not really sure why it took Apple another three years to formally discontinue it for good.