Discussion

Apple discontinues the Mac Pro with no plans for future hardware

magic_hamster: > gone are the days of PCIe.My GPU, NVMe drives and motherboard might disagree.

openports: R.I.P. to the cheese grater

Lucasoato: Scarlett 2i2 has been amazing for me, I’d say unbeatable in terms of quality/price ratio.

longislandguido: In 2007 Steve Jobs went on stage (next to a very young-looking Tim Cook) and angrily told a reporter "we don't ship junk". Those days are over, because the flagship product is now a $600 netbook.

kelnos: It's sad that "you can replace the SSD" is in some people's eyes "serviceable, repairable, and upgradeable".We should demand better of our computer-manufacturing overlords.> It’s not like you can drop an RTX 5090 in there.Why not? Oh, right, because Apple won't let you. Sad.

lapcat: The 2013 trash can was the end of the Mac Pro. It was never the same after that. The 2012 and earlier Mac Pros were awesome. I had a 2010 model. Here's what I loved:• Multiple hard drive bays for easy swapping of disks, with a side panel that the user could open and close• Expandable RAM• Lots of ports, including audio• The tower took up no desktop space• It was relatively affordable, starting at $2500. Many software developers had one. (The 2019 and later Mac Pros were insanely expensive, starting at $6000.)The Mac Studio is affordable, but it lacks those other features. It has more ports than other Macs but fewer in number and kind than the old Mac Pro, because the Mac Studio is a pointlessly small desktop instead of floor tower.

__loam: The studio is also like 5x as fast as those machines.

lapcat: What's your point? Of course processors have gotten a lot faster between 2012 and 2025.I was talking about the form factor of the machine.

chasingtheflow: Except by most all regards that product is great.

longislandguido: By "great" do you mean 8GB of non-upgradable soldered RAM in 2026?

testing22321: That handily edits multiple 4K streams

longislandguido: The simping for Apple in this thread is palpable.

wtallis: Those are all for Intel Macs, and not even the recent Intel Macs. You can't use a passive adapter to put a NVMe SSD into a current Mac like you could a decade ago, because back then the only thing non-standard about the SSD was the connector. Now most of the SSD controller itself has moved to the SoC and trying to put an off the shelf SSD into the current slot makes no more sense than trying to put an SSD into a DIMM slot.

longislandguido: That's when they stopped designing computers for the pro market and started selling mid-century Danish furniture that can also edit videos.I knew it was all over when third party companies had to develop the necessarily-awkward rack mount kits for those contraptions. If Apple actually cared about or understood their pro customers, they would have built a first party solution for their needs. Like sell an actual rack-mount computer again—the horror!Instead, an editing suite got what looked like my bathroom wastebasket.

testing22321: Burn more power for a slower computer! That’ll shoe em.

giancarlostoro: Honestly the Mac Studio is the new Mac Pro, this makes more sense to me.

dangus: I didn’t phrase myself very well. What I’m saying is that the loss of the Mac Pro didn’t reduce the repairability or modularity at all in the product lineup.It was exactly as modular as the Mac mini and Mac Studio.The only difference is that it had some PCIe slots that basically had no use since you couldn’t throw a GPU in there, and because thunderbolt 5 exists.Yeah, sure, there were some niche PCIe things that two people probably used. Hence the discontinuation.I am an ex-Mac user, I own a Framework. Don’t worry, you’re preaching to the choir.

aprilnya: - GPU is integrated into the SoC - Surprisingly, it is possible to plug a drive into a TB/USB port…so what do you actually need PCIe for?

rayiner: [delayed]

jryio: If you're reading this, we're sorry John!

GeekyBear: The Ultra variants of the M series chips had previously consisted of two of the Max chips bonded together.The M5 generation Pro and Max chips have moved to a chiplet based architecture, with all the CPU cores on one chiplet, and all the GPU cores on another.https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M5So what will the M5 Ultra look like?If you integrate two CPU chiplets and two GPU chiplets, you're looking at 36 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, and 1228 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

rogerrogerr: > simp: be excessively attentive or submissive to a person in whom one is romantically or sexually interested.This word does not appear to be in any way relevant. You do not have to buy a MacBook Neo, but approximately everyone else in the low-end laptop market will.If you think it is a bad product, go buy some Acer stock.

tylerflick: > gone are the days of PCIeThunderbolt is external PCIe.

HeWhoLurksLate: but what about second GPU?

jmgao: MCPRUE sells shameless ripoffs of the Mac Pro case, but with support for standard motherboard sizing, if you really want your PC to double as a cheese grater: https://www.mcprue.com/case

readitalready: Apple really dropped the ball here. They had every ability to make something competitive with Nvidia for AI training as well as inference, by selling high end multi GPU Mac Pro workstations as well as servers, but for some reason chose not to. They had the infrastructure and custom SoCs and everything. What a waste.It really could have been a bigger market for them than even the iPhone.

A_D_E_P_T: Just about everybody who isn't Nvidia dropped the ball, bigtime.Intel should have shipped their GPUs with much more VRAM from day one. If they had done this, they'd have carved out a massive niche and much more market share, and it would have been trivially simple.AMD should have improved their tools and software, etc.Apple should have done as you say.Google had nigh on a decade to boost TPU production, and they're still somehow behind the curve.And thus Nvidia is, now quite durably, the most valuable company in the world. Imagine telling this to a time traveler from 2018.

jltsiren: High-end Macs have moved to PCIe 5.0 speeds in their internal drives. Thunderbolt 5 is not fast enough to get the same performance from external ones.Thunderbolt is also too slow for higher-end networks. A single port is already insufficient for 100-gigabit speeds.

therealmarv: but even that one looks kinda outdated when looking at latest M5 Max laptops.

ks2048: With the popularity of mac mini (and macbooks for that matter) for doing ML/AI work, I would have thought Apple could make a Mac Pro that could make for a good workstation for doing in-house ML/AI stuff.I bought a GPU maybe a decade ago for this, and it's not worth the hassle (for me at least), but a nice out-of-the box solution, I would pay for.

system2: If I remember correctly, the maximum configuration was something like $35k back in the day. I wonder what those people feel like now. On the other hand, if they have $35k to burn, probably they don't even think about it.

SpecialistK: When it was introduced, Apple said the trash can was a revolution in cooling design.Then they said they couldn't upgrade the components because of heat. Everyone knows that wasn't true.By the time Apple said they had issues with it in 2017, AMD were offering 14nm GCN4 and 5 graphics (Polaris and Vega) compared to the 28nm GCN1 graphics in the FirePro range. Intel had moved from Ivy Bridge to Skylake for Xeons. And if they wanted to be really bold (doubtful, as the move to ARM was coming) then the 1st gen Epyc was on the market too.Moore's Law didn't stop applying for 6 years. They had options and chose to abandon their flagship product (and most loyal customers) instead.

dijit: The biggest issue was actually that the Mac Pro was designed specifically for dual GPUs- in the era of SLI this made some sense, but once that technology was abandoned it was a technological dead-end.If you take one apart you'll see why, it's not the case that you could have ever swapped around the components to make it dual-CPU instead; it really was "dual GPU or bust".Somewhat ironically, in todays ML ecosystem, that architecture would probably do great. Though I doubt it could possibly do better than what the M-series is doing by itself using unified memory.

leohonexus: I own one and there's nothing shameful about it. It's basically CNCed to Apple's standards, just without the logo. The cool thing is since Studio Displays work on Windows too, with Thunderbolt motherboards you can have a setup that's visually the same as a Mac but is actually a PC.P.S. Does anyone know how well Studio Displays now work on Linux? The best I could get it to work was on Ubuntu, where it basically worked out of the fresh install. X11 KDE on Fedora was a close second. Couldn't get it working on Wayland whatsoever.

vlovich123: When people talk about 100gigabit networks for Macs, im really curious what kind of network you run at home and how much money you spent on it. Even at work I’m generally seeing 10gigabit network ports with 100gigabit+ only in data centers where macs don’t have a presence

Forgeties79: I work in media production and I have the same thought constantly. Hell I curse in church as far as my industry is concerned because I find 2.5 to be fine for most of us. 10 absolutely.

vlovich123: Don’t mistake stock market performance for revenue. NVIDIA makes ~200B annually, same as what Apple makes from iPhones. It’s a big market but GPUs aren’t just AI.

zer00eyz: > something competitive with Nvidia for AI trainingApple is counting on something else: model shrink. Every one is now looking at "how do we make these smaller".At some point a beefy Mac Studio and the "right sized" model is going to be what people want. Apple dumped a 4 pack of them in the hands of a lot of tech influencers a few months back and they were fairly interesting (expensive tho).

macintux: You realize that most customer shopping for the cheapest computer they can find are not going to upgrade their RAM.And Apple is effectively committing to supporting 8GB computers with their OS upgrades for years to come.

angoragoats: > gone are the days of PCIeThis is a wild and very wrong take.Just about every single consumer computer shipped today uses PCIe. If you were referring to only only the physical PCIe slots, that's wrong too: the vast majority of desktop computers, servers, and workstations shipped in 2025 had physical PCIe slots (the only ones that didn't were Macs and certain mini-PCs).The 2023 Mac Pro was dead on arrival because Apple doesn't let you use PCIe GPUs in their systems.

GeekyBear: Thunderbolt is PCIe running over a cable.

SpecialistK: I'll admit that while I've used the trash can but never taken it apart myself. But I can't imagine it would have been impossible to throw 2x Polaris 10 GPUs on the daughterboards in place of the FirePros.

angoragoats: Yes, I know; this is part of what I was implying when I said "Just about every single consumer computer shipped today uses PCIe."I don't understand how this is a response to anything I said.

dijit: Honestly I don't care, but Apples SSDs don't have a storage controller on them, and those adapters are designed to "bypass" the controller on m.2 drives.You can argue that it's different for the sake of being different, butA) I personally don't always hold that monopoly is a good thing, even if we agree m.2 is fairly decent it doesn't make it universally the best.B) I'd make the argument that Apple is competing very well with performance and reliability..C) IIRC there are some hardware guarantees that the new filesystem needs to be aware of (for wear levelling and error-correction) and those would be obfuscated by a controller that thinks its smarter than the CPU and OS.

angoragoats: A Ryzen 9800X3D is about 40% faster in single-core tests and the same speed to slightly faster at multi-core tasks, as compared to the M2 Ultra in the Mac Pro. In addition, the Ryzen computer would presumably be modular and allow for the user to choose their preferred configuration of memory, storage, GPU, etc, with options far exceeding those offered by Apple in its limited and non-user-upgradable machine. In addition, configuring the Ryzen machine with comparable specs to the base model Mac Pro (64GB of ram, 1TB of storage, and a low-end to midrange discrete GPU) would put you at a total system cost of something like 20-25% of the $6999 that the Mac Pro cost, even with today's inflated memory prices.I'm not sure if this is what the parent meant by "a real modern PC," but it would certainly be 1) faster and 2) vastly cheaper than the Mac. So at minimum, your assertion that it'd be slower is wrong.Depending on your configuration, you could likely also match the overall power consumption of the Mac as well, though yes, it is easily possible to exceed it. But the most likely way you'd exceed it is with a high-end GPU, which would vastly outperform the (fixed, non-upgradeable) GPU in the Mac.

longislandguido: Here's an interesting fact, one of the more famous and fanatical fanboy Mac Pro users was late radio host Rush Limbaugh (he owned four of them), who dedicated an entire segment to the topic on his normally all-politics show when Apple dropped the ball on Thunderbolt back in the day.

hazz99: Plus modern interconnects like CXL are also layers on top of PCIe, and USB4 supports PCIe tunnelling. PCIe is a big collection of specifications, the physical/link/transaction layers can be mixed and matched and evolved separately.I don't see it disappearing, at most we'll get PCIe 6/7/etc.

jasomill: Aside from the GPU mess, the 2013 was a nice machine, basically a proto-Mac Studio. Aside from software, the only thing that pushed me off my D300/64GB/12-core as an everyday desktop + front-end machine is the fact that there's no economically sensible way to get 4K video at 120 Hz given that an eGPU enclosure + a decent AMD GPU would cost as much as a Mac mini, so I'm slumming it in Windows for a few months until the smoke clears from the next Mac Studio announcement.At which point I'll decide whether to replace my Mac Pro with a Mac Studio or a Linux workstation; honestly, I'm about 60/40 leaning towards Linux at this point, in which case I'd also buy a lower-end Mac, probably a MacBook Air.

jltsiren: Local AI is probably the most common application these days.Apple recently added support for InfiniBand over Thunderbolt. And now almost all decent Mac Studio configurations have sold out. Those two may be connected.

bombcar: Is it strange that only now do I want the shirt?

dd8601fn: $1,000 just for the case... ouch! (neat though)

shrinks99: I own one of these, it is amazingly well manufactured. Not cheap, but (with the exception of the power button) well made.

adolph: In other news, the Mac Pro Wheels Kit was also discontinued.https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/26/mac-pro-wheels-kit-disc...

washadjeffmad: Gaming isn't what people are using Mac Studios for. Thunderbolt also isn't a substitute for OCuLink.

rayiner: Sure, but it’s probably reflective of the fact that GPUs generally aren’t PCIe-bandwidth bound. Also, TB5 and Oculink2 both use PCI 4.0 x4 links.

dijit: I think on a technical level you're right, but you need to run two of them and they'd need a custom design like so:https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/RQIAAOSwxKFoTHe3/s-l1200.jpgFor what is essentially a dead-end technology, I'm somewhat doubtful people would have bought it (since the second GPU is going to be idle and add to the cost massively).the CPU being upgraded would have been much easier though I think.

whalesalad: it's not just about pcie, it's socketed memory and disks. I guess disks are just pcie technically - but memory sockets are great. hell, in the pro chassis I am surprised they didn't opt for a socketed cpu that could be upgraded.