Apple Has Reportedly Lost Interest in the Mac Pro

Apple’s Mac Pro, which was the last Mac model to make the transition to the company’s M-Series chips, may well be headed to the Apple graveyard. In this latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that there’s currently no new Mac Pro model in the pipeline as Apple shifted its focus to the smaller Mac Studio.

“From what I’ve heard inside the company, Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro. The sentiment internally is that the Mac Studio now represents both the present and future of Apple’s professional desktop strategy,” Gurman wrote.

According to the reporter, Apple is currently testing a new M5 Ultra chip that will only ship in an upcoming Mac Studio model. The Mac Pro, however, was last updated in June 2023 with an M2 Ultra chip. That model still starts at a whopping $6,999, while the latest Mac Studio with an M3 Ultra chip starts at $3.999. Apple also released a cheaper version of the desktop computer with an M4 Max chip starting at $1,999.

The Mac Pro remains the only desktop Mac model with a modular design, with six PCIe Gen 4 expansion slots and eight Thunderbolt ports. It’s also available in both tower and rack-mounted enclosures, but its appeal remains limited to a very niche audience.

Even though it’s not upgradable like the Mac Pro, the Mac Studio, with its much smaller form factor, is probably enough for most power users. While it’s not upgraded as often as Apple’s MacBooks, the top-of-the-line M3 Ultra model offers a maximum of 512GB of unified memory and 16TB of storage for $14,099.