Apple comes to bury Mac Pro, not to raise it
Apple has discontinued Mac Pro, confirming the Mac Studio will remain the most powerful Mac money can buy. The company has removed the machine from its website and says it does not plan to design a new version of the product, nor to introduce any upgrade to the existing machines.
In truth, the fate of the Mac has been written ever since Apple Silicon and the M-series chips appeared. These highly performant systems don’t need the kind of ventilation supplied by the Mac Pro design, as they enable more powerful, cooler, energy-efficient systems in much smaller form factors.
Apple last updated Mac Pro in 2023 with an M2 Ultra chip, but the design has remained the same since 2019. I’m old enough to remember when the Mac Pro  was presented as proof positive that Apple continued to innovate the Mac platform. So is Simon Jary, who has penned a very readable history of the Mac desktop.
By mid-2013 the future of the desktop Mac seemed to be in question, so much so that CEO Tim Cook promised a Mac Pro was coming, while VP-now-Apple Fellow, Phil Schiller famously used the phrase, “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass,” to quell critics during the trashcan Mac Pro product launch in 2014. The product was revised again in 2019 with a $5,999 price tag
These days you can get more power for less cash with an M3 Ultra Mac Studio, which is likely to be blessed with an M5 Ultra chip this year, meaning that with Apple Silicon Apple now embraces notebooks, tablets, desktops, and smartphones, all with more power and performance than their Intel ancestors.
To put this into perspective, a fully maxed-out trashcan Mac Pro actually offered less performance than the MacBook Neo, which you can now pick up for under $500.
That’s progress.
That’s also the power of Apple Silicon.
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