The Tower Has Fallen: Apple Officially Retires the Mac Pro
Kevin Burnell / Shutterstock
Toggle Dark Mode
While the writing has been on the wall for a while, Apple has just officially pulled the plug on the Mac Pro, quietly removing its iconic desktop tower from the online store and confirming to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer a future version of what was once considered the powerful behemoth of its lineup.
It wasn’t hard to see that the Mac Pro was already on the back burner, considering it’s had one lone update in the Apple silicon era, gaining an M2 Ultra chip in mid-2023. However, that came alongside the similarly-equipped Mac Studio, which showed just how much the silicon landscape had changed from the era when bigger computers automatically implied more raw processing power.
In fact, Apple’s first Mac Studio, released in early 2022 with no Mac Pro update in sight, gave us every reason to believe this would be Apple’s path forward. TheM1 Ultra inside ran circles around even the most powerful 2019 Intel Mac Pro, and in an era when all that power could be packed into a form factor not much larger than a Mac mini, left many questioning the reason for the Mac Pro’s existence.
By the time Apple released the M2 Ultra versions of both in 2023 that question had been answered. There were no performance differences between the two machines, leaving the Mac Pro’s only real advantages lying in aesthetics — some still really like the boxy tower look — and expandability via PCIe expansion slots.
However, that last part turned out to be something of an empty promise. While the Intel Mac Pro supported GPU accelerators and upgradeable RAM, there wasn’t really much you could do with an Apple silicon system. The 76-core GPU in the M2 Ultra was certainly no slouch, meaning most folks didn’t need to add a graphics accelerator, which was good news as you couldn’t even if you wanted to. Similarly, the unified memory was built into the M2 Ultra chip just like in every other Apple silicon device. For the most part, what you bought was what you got.
Even though other PCIe cards were fully supported, allowing for things like Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink Quad 2 to handle SDI input and output, nearly all of these studio-style expansions are also available as external Thunderbolt devices, and those who really need PCIe versions can opt for an external expansion chassis — and the Thunderbolt 5 ports on the newest M3 Ultra Mac Studio have basically killed the bandwidth argument for internal PCIe for 99% of video pros. As clean as it may be to put all the cards in one tower, the Mac Pro also takes up a lot more space than a Mac Studio.
Last year, as we began hearing leaks of Apple’s 2026 Mac roadmap that omitted any mention of the Mac Pro, it wasn’t hard to guess what was coming — or, rather, what wasn’t. By November, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that “Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro,” with the Mac Studio being positioned as “both the present and future of Apple’s professional desktop strategy. While Apple had reportedly pondered the idea of an M4 Ultra chip exclusively for the Mac Pro, it axed those plans, and the M5 Ultra that’s undoubtedly coming next will be destined solely for the Mac Studio.
If anything, the Mac Pro has become a relic of the Intel era — a period when you could fry an egg on a CPU unless you housed it in a massive case with big fans. The earliest M1 MacBook Air proved that fans were largely unnecessary, signaling a departure from a time when MacBooks sounded like they were preparing for takeoff under any kind of load. Along the same lines, the M2 Ultra Mac Pro proved itself to have no performance advantage over the Mac Studio, even when handling the most demanding tasks. Apple’s M-series chips are just that cool — literally.
