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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

666 points by bentocorp 6mo ago

chvid 6mo ago
The only thing that is missing from the current Mac line up is a one rack unit machine.
- magarnicle 6mo ago
  They had that with the previous gen mini, but the new ones are too tall now.
al_borland 6mo ago
They've been trying to kill the Mac Pro for over a decade. I wonder how long before they backtrack again? It seems like they should at least have a migration path for users who needed the expansion cards the Mac Pro supported. Pushing them to the PC seems pretty bad. Apple's new "Pro" definition seems more like "Prosumer".
- bigyabai 6mo ago
  The form-factor always felt like a weird fit for Apple Silicon. With the Intel boxes it was understandable; you want a few liters of free space for a couple AMD cards or some transcode hardware. The system was designed to be expandable, and the Mac Pro was the apex of Apple's commitment to that philosophy after bungling the trashcan Mac Pro. None of the Apple Silicon hardware can seemingly justify this form factor, though. The memory isn't serviceable, PCIe devices aren't really supported, the PSU doesn't need much space, and the cooling can be handled with mobile-tier hardware. Apple's migration path is "my way or the highway" for Mac Pro owners.
  - redwall_hp 6mo ago
    I suspect we'll start seeing higher-spec Mac Studio options. One of those with an M* Ultra, and some sort of Thunderbolt storage expansion would probably cover most of the Pro's use cases. And Apple probably doesn't want to deal with anything more exotic than those.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      Can't you already stack 4 Studios? Building a $1,000 case to hold them makes some sort of Apple sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4_RsUxRjKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4_RsUxRjKU or something
  - al_borland 6mo ago
    Their justification for the form factor, when it was released, was that pro users need various PCI cards to interface with some of their equipment, and this would allow them to do that. It seemed like the guts of the Mac Pro were essentially shoved inside of a box and stuck in the corner of the tower. It would seem like they could decouple it and sell a box that pro users could load cards into (like other companies do for eGPUs). It wouldn’t feel like a very Apple-like setup, but it would function and allow Apple to focus where they want to focus without simply leaving those users behind. I suppose the other option would be to dispense with the smoke and mirrors and let people slot a Mac Studio right into the Mac Pro tower, so it could be upgraded independently of the tower. The alternative is people leave the platform or end up with a bunch of Thunderbolt spaghetti. Neither of which seem ideal.
    - testing22321 6mo ago
      It was always strange the Apple Silicon kept the 1.3kw power supply which was massive overkill. I always hoped we’d get a consumer version of what they have internally - 10 or 20 or more Apple Silicon chips for 1000 cores or so.
      - bombcar 6mo ago
        A bunch of the Mac Pro decisions seem to have been more driven by "we have a warehouse of these parts" than "this is what the system needs".
        dijit 6mo ago
        A lot of Apples offerings feel a bit like that actually. To be expected when lord of the supply chain Tim Cook is running the show.
        NetMageSCW 6mo ago
        Apple doesn’t end up with a lot of parts in warehouses because they control the supply chain so well.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- wmf 6mo ago
  The migration path is Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures (basically eGPU enclosures but you don't have to use a GPU).
  - bigyabai 6mo ago
    > but you don't have to use a GPU That's a cute way of saying that GPUs aren't supported.
  - eigenspace 6mo ago
    Not only are third party GPUs not supported on apple silicon, but thunderbolt has significantly more latency and lower bandwidth than 'real' PCIe implementations, even ones with similarly cut down lanes like oculink. Apple tried before to push everything out into external PCIe enclosures and people hated it. Maybe this'll go differently this time, the Mac Studio is certainly a much more compelling offering than the trashcan Mac Pro. But I think this is still a shitty and painful situation for a lot of specific users.
    - NetMageSCW 6mo ago
      I think “a lot” is heavily exaggerated- more like a few niche users.
      - eigenspace 6mo ago
        Oh yeah, the market for these capabilities is tiny, no doubt. But at least historically, the people that wanted these things tended to be very big lucrative customers, and also tended to be very influential word-of-mouth Apple evangalists. Just as a random personal example, my uncle was an Apple guy since the 80s, and when I was a kid in the early 2000s he always had a Mac Pro, several Macbook pros, and a bunch of other Apple gear. He played a big role in convincing all of his 3 other brothers that Apple was the way to go, and those brothers then raised kids in households with only Apple computers. This uncle is still a mostly Apple user, but he's increasingly pissed at Apple, and definitely no longer evangelical in recommending it to people. He needs to have a linux server machine for his home NAS, and another one for some specialized work applications and it really frustrates him that Apple abandoned his market segment. I think there's a real possibility that if Apple had pissed him off like this in the early 2000s instead of the 2020s, that our wider family might have not ended up as being so Apple centric, so Apple may have missed out on a lot more sales than just a couple of Mac Pros and expensive software licenses.
pjmlp 6mo ago
Now everyone that needs classical workstations can finally move on into Linux or Windows workloads. Believe t-shirts at WWDC were not enough. Thus the workstation market joins OS X Server.
- Amorymeltzer 6mo ago
  For those who don't know what the t-shirt reference is, it's a creation by John Siracusa/The Accidental Tech Podcast: <https://cottonbureau.com/p/4RUVDA/shirt/mac-pro-believe-dark https://cottonbureau.com/p/4RUVDA/shirt/mac-pro-believe-dark>.
  - nosrepa 6mo ago
    And I still don't get it.
    - Amorymeltzer 6mo ago
      Siracusa—probably best known here for doing fabulous OS X reviews for Ars—is a co-host of ATP. He is also known is such circles for having Mac Pros, and using them for a long time (sometimes by choice, sometimes by circumstance). He thinks Apple should make a Mac Pro, not necessarily because it's a big seller, but because he thinks Apple should make a "best computer," much in the same way car companies might make a car that will never sell but pushes engineers, etc. They made a shirt. It was fun.
      - WillAdams 6mo ago
        Ages ago, when new Mac hardware came out, I'd amuse myself by putting together an "ultimate Mac workstation" in the configurator --- once upon a time, one could hit 6 figures pretty easily --- these days, well I panic bought a duplicate computer because I was worried a chipped/cracked display was going to make it unusable (turns out a screen protector has worked thus far). I agree with the reasoning, and would like to see Apple continue to make aspirational hardware, but maybe the mainstream stuff is good enough?
w-m 6mo ago
While the trash can generation was somewhat present and around, I don't think I ever saw a cheese grater in the flesh. Did it have any users? Were there any actual useful expansion cards? Did anybody continue buying this at all, after it didn't get the M3 Ultra bump, that the Mac Studio got last year?
- m463 6mo ago
  The cheese grater mac pros were very popular, in that people got them and continued to use them. The most notable feature was that there were mac-specific graphics cards, and you could also run PC graphics cards (without a nice boot screen). They had a 1.4kw power supply I believe, and there was extra pcie power for higher-end graphics cards. You could upgrade the memory, add up to 6 or more sata hard disks (2 in dvd slot). You could run windows, dual booting if you wanted and apple supported the drivers. The 2013 was kind of a joke. small and quiet, but expansion was minimal. 2019 looked beefy, but the expansion was more like a cash register for apple, not really democratic. There were 3rd party sata hard disk solutions, the 2023 model was basically a joke. I think maybe the pcie slots were ok for nvme cards, not a lot else (unless apple made it). nowadays an apple computer is more like an iphone - apple would prefer if everything was welded shut.
  - hbn 6mo ago
    > nowadays an apple computer is more like an iphone - apple would prefer if everything was welded shut. Funny timing to say that https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-repairable-macbook-in-14-years https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-r...
- waz0wski 6mo ago
  I just replaced a 2009 MacPro It had many hardware upgrades over the years - upgraded CPUs, 128GB RAM, 4TB NVME storage, a modern AMD GPU, USB3/c, thunderbolt, etc The only reason it got replaced is because it became too much of a PITA to keep modern OSX running on it (via OCLP) Replaced with an M4 Max Mac Studio, which is a nice and faster machine but with no ability to upgrade anything and much worse hardware resale value on M-series I'll have to replace it in 2-3 years
dangus 6mo ago
> Serviceable, repairable, upgradable Macs are officially a thing of the past. Well, not exactly. Apple’s desktop Macs actually all have modular SSD storage, and third parties sell upgrade kits. And it’s not like Thunderbolt is a slouch as far as expandability. I can see why the Mac Pro is gone. Yeah, it has PCIe slots…that I don’t really think anyone is using. It’s not like you can drop an RTX 5090 in there. The latest Mac Pro didn’t have upgradable memory so it wasn’t much different than a Mac Studio with a bunch of empty space inside. The Mac Studio is very obviously a better buy for someone looking for a system like that. It’s just hard to imagine who the Mac Pro is for at its pricing and size. I think what happened is that the Studio totally cannibalized Mac Pro sales.
- bigyabai 6mo ago
  > Apple’s desktop Macs actually all have modular SSD storage "Modular" does not mean that it's serviceable, repairable or upgradable. Apple's refusal to adopt basic M.2 spec is a pretty glaring example of that.
  - internet2000 6mo ago
    > Apple's refusal to adopt basic M.2 spec I get the ideological angle, but in practical terms that's not a barrier: https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-apple-ssd-adapter.html?spm=a2g0o.home.search.0 https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-apple-ssd-adapter.html...
    - bigyabai 6mo ago
      This is the USB-C dongle argument all over again, but with a proprietary connector that a total of one (1) company uses.
      - dijit 6mo ago
        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, but A) 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. if we're talking about Intel era Macs then that proprietary connector predates M.2 entirely and is actually even thinner and smaller (which is pretty important when the primary use-cases is thin-and-lights); though I suppose that the adapter fits is a sign that it would have been possible to use a larger connector...
brailsafe 6mo ago
Pour one out for John Siracusa
- sgerenser 6mo ago
  I guess not enough people bought the shirt: https://cottonbureau.com/p/4RUVDA/shirt/mac-pro-believe-dark#/30018634/tee-men-premium-lightweight-vintage-royal-tri-blend-s https://cottonbureau.com/p/4RUVDA/shirt/mac-pro-believe-dark...
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    Is it strange that only now do I want the shirt?
    - brailsafe 6mo ago
      I think we're all there with you :)
      - wpm 6mo ago
        They better do another run.
        brailsafe 6mo ago
        Mac Pro... We Believed
  - philistine 6mo ago
    Or too many people bought the shirt instead of a Mac Pro.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      The shirt was a bit cheaper. And probably a bit faster processing, too.
- 6mo ago
internet2000 6mo ago
I hope I can get a cheap one on Craigslist eventually, just for the novelty. It looks so cool.
- spot 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - testing22321 6mo ago
    Burn more power for a slower computer! That’ll shoe em.
    - angoragoats 6mo ago
      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.
      - hu3 6mo ago
        Can confirm. I have a Ryzen 9800X3D with RTX 5070, 128GB of RAM and TBs of Gen 5.0 NVMes. Not only it is screamingly fast (the fastest on earth for some workloads), but I can upgrade it easily. And is dead silent too. The best thing is it runs native Linux and it just works.
longislandguido 6mo ago
Apple betrayed their pro customers years ago—right around the time they went to version X of the Pro apps—it's all been a slow death by a thousand paper cuts since then. The money's all in selling phones to teen girls now, and taking their mafia cut of app store sales.
IFC_LLC 6mo ago
I think that's an expected thing. G5 was the thing. And companies were buying G5 and other macs like that all the time, because you were able to actually extend it with video cards and some special equipment. But now we have M chips. You don't need video for M chips. You kinda do, but truthfully, it's cheaper to buy a beefier Mac than to install a video card. Pro was a great thing for designers and video editors, those freaks who need to color-calibrate monitors. And right now even mini works just fine for that. And as for extensions - gone are the days of PCIe. Audio cards and other specialized equipment works and lives just fine on USB-C and Thunderbolt. I remember how many months I've spent trying to make Creative Labs Sound Blaster to work on my 486 computer. At that time you had to have a card to extend your system. Right now I'm using Scarlett 2i2 from Focusrite. It works over USB-C with my iPhone, iPad and Mac. DJIs mics work just as good. Damn, you can buy Oscilloscope that works over USB-C or network. It's not the Mac's or Apple's fault. We are actually live in the age where systems are quite independent and do not require direct installations.
- Lucasoato 6mo ago
  Scarlett 2i2 has been amazing for me, I’d say unbeatable in terms of quality/price ratio.
- magic_hamster 6mo ago
  > gone are the days of PCIe. My GPU, NVMe drives and motherboard might disagree.
  - aprilnya 6mo ago
    - 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?
    - HeWhoLurksLate 6mo ago
      but what about second GPU?
longislandguido 6mo ago
[flagged]
- chasingtheflow 6mo ago
  Except by most all regards that product is great.
  - longislandguido 6mo ago
    By "great" do you mean 8GB of non-upgradable soldered RAM in 2026?
    - testing22321 6mo ago
      That handily edits multiple 4K streams
      - longislandguido 6mo ago
        [flagged]
        rogerrogerr 6mo ago
        > 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.
        bigyabai 6mo ago
        > but approximately everyone else in the low-end laptop market will. No, they won't. People repeat this, but Macs constitute a minority of the low-end market and will continue to for the foreseeable future. This has been the case when $400 Retina Intel Macbooks were flooding the used market; it was the case when Costco sold $700 M1 MBAs. If you cannot extrapolate what will happen with the $600 laptop, then I don't think you have payed attention to what the market is buying.
openports 6mo ago
R.I.P. to the cheese grater
lapcat 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  The studio is also like 5x as fast as those machines.
  - lapcat 6mo ago
    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.
- longislandguido 6mo ago
  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.
- SpecialistK 6mo ago
  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.
giancarlostoro 6mo ago
Honestly the Mac Studio is the new Mac Pro, this makes more sense to me.
- therealmarv 6mo ago
  but even that one looks kinda outdated when looking at latest M5 Max laptops.
  - jshier 6mo ago
    Mac Studio waits for the Ultra chips to ship, which are always last in a generation. Perhaps the M5's chiplet architecture will help them move faster there.
GeekyBear 6mo ago
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_M5 https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M5 So 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.
- muro 6mo ago
  Or it could be the same CPU as in pro/max with more GPU chiplets.
  - GeekyBear 6mo ago
    Sure. AI workloads would really benefit from having more RAM, GPU cores, and memory channels.
    - bigyabai 6mo ago
      Something tells me this mentality is how Apple ended up with thousands of idling Private Cloud Compute servers. But sure, more GPU cores will definitely fix it this time.
system2 6mo ago
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.
- giantrobot 6mo ago
  If you spend $35k and just idle the machine or just check e-mail you've burnt the money. If it's your work machine and you've got a $100/hr billable rate it's paid for in a little over a month. Three months at a $50/hr rate. If you bought the $35k Mac Pro in 2023 when it was released and have a $50/hr rate it's been paid off for about 30 months. So as of today those owners probably aren't too broken hearted. They'll likely get at least another three years out of them. People buying $35k Mac Pros probably paid them off after a single contract. So they've just been making money rather than costing money.
  - klausa 6mo ago
    >If it's your work machine and you've got a $100/hr billable rate it's paid for in a little over a month. Are you working 996 weeks or something? At standard 40h work-week the math works out to 8.75 weeks to "pay for itself".
    - bluedino 6mo ago
      What if that machine lets you do your job 4x faster?
      - klausa 6mo ago
        I don’t think working faster 4x makes you experience time dilation to the degree that you experience 8.75 weeks as 4 in your frame of reference; but my relativity math is a bit rusty, I could be wrong.
  - gjm11 6mo ago
    I think these calculations are a bit bogus. If you spend $35k on a nice computer, and then earn $35k from doing some work using it, that doesn't mean that buying the computer has paid for itself unless the computer is solely responsible for that income. It probably isn't. It's not necessarily even true that after doing that work it's "paid for", in the sense that getting the $35k income means that you were able to afford the $35k computer: that only follows if you didn't need any of that income for other luxuries, such as food and shelter. If you're earning $50/hour, 40hr/week then what you've done after 17.5 weeks is earned enough to buy that $35k computer. Assuming you don't need any of that money for anything else, like food and shelter. If the fancy computer helps you get that income then of course it's perfectly legit to estimate how much difference it makes and decide it pays for itself, but it's not as simple as comparing the price of the computer with your total income. Regardless of how much it contributes, if you have plenty of money then it's also perfectly legit to say "I can comfortably afford this and I want it so I'll but it" but, again, it's not as simple as comparing the price of the computer with your total income.
ks2048 6mo ago
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.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  The problem is that the M1 chips foretold the doom of the Mac Pro unless they could figure out some way to do something that you couldn't do with a Mac Studio - thunderbolt is so good that it's hard to justify anything else. If they had done more with NUMA in the M series maybe you could have a Mac Pro with M5 Ultras that can take a number of M5 "daughter cards" that do something useful.
readitalready 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 to do. 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. Such a lack of vision. And thus Nvidia is, now quite durably, the most valuable company in the world. Imagine telling that to a time traveler from 2018.
  - readitalready 6mo ago
    I think for AMD, they were focused on competing against Intel. Remember AMD was almost bankrupt about 15 years ago because of competing against Intel. But the very first GPU use for AI was actually with an ATI/AMD GPU, not an Nvidia one. Everyone thinks Nvidia kicked off the GPU AI craze when Ilya Sutskever cleaned up on AlexNet with an Nvidia GPU back in 2012, or when Andrew Ng and team at Stanford published their "Large Scale Deep Unsupervised Learning using Graphics Processors" in 2009, but in 2004, a couple of Korean researchers were the first to implement neural networks on a GPU, using ATI Radeons: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031320304000524 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00313... And as of now I do believe AMD is in the second strongest position in the datacenter space after Nvidia, ahead of even Google.
  - bigstrat2003 6mo ago
    > And thus Nvidia is, now quite durably, the most valuable company in the world. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world right up until the AI bubble pops. Which, while it's hard to nail down when, is going to happen. I wouldn't call their position durable at all.
BirAdam 6mo ago
Reading comments, I don’t think people are being completely fair here. For Intel and AMD to approach what Apple has accomplished they’re making many of the same compromises with Panther Lake and Ryzen AI Max. Apple chose to put disk controllers on their SoP rather than having them on the storage module. This shaves a tiny bit of latency. Worth it? No idea. I’m shit at hardware design. As for not having a Pro or otherwise expandable system? It’s shit. They make several variations of their chips, and I don’t think it would hurt them to make an SoP for a socket, put a giant cooling system in it, and give it 10 or 12 PCIe slots. As for what would go in those slots? Make this beast rack mountable and people would toss better network cards, sound/video output or capture, storage controllers, and all kinds of other things in there. A key here would be to not charge so much just because they can. Make the price reasonable.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  They have tried variations of this since time immemorial (we can argue about "price reasonablé") but there's just not much you can do with it that you can't do much cheaper or simpler in other ways. The Xserve has been dead for 15 years now, and it was never tremendously amazing (though it was nice kit). Apple apparently has some sort of "in-house" xserve-like thing they don't sell; but turning that into a product would likely be more useful than a Mac Pro, unless they add NUMA or some other way of allowing an M5 to access racks and racks of DIMMs.
  - matthewfcarlson 6mo ago
    WSJ recently did a thing about it but details were rather light
karim79 6mo ago
I have three of the trash can ones. They are absolute pieces of art, as useless as they are computationally these days (energy-to-performance wise at least). I will never sell nor give them away.
adolph 6mo ago
In other news, the Mac Pro Wheels Kit was also discontinued. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/26/mac-pro-wheels-kit-discontinued/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/26/mac-pro-wheels-kit-disc...
bredren 6mo ago
I’m much less concerned about the Mac Pro and more concerned we won’t see an XDR Ultra Display to replace the 32”.
- matthewfcarlson 6mo ago
  They did come out with a new XDR. It’s just not 32”.
lukeh 6mo ago
Still rocking a 2019 (Intel) Mac Pro here, all slots filled with various Pro Tools and UAD DSP cards, SSD, GPU, etc. I'm planning to get as much mileage out of it as I can. I'm sure a Studio would be more performant, but the Thunderbolt to PCIe chassis are not cheap.
- alifeinbinary 6mo ago
  i’m in the same boat. I bought mine back in 2021 and honestly I don’t regret my decision. It’s my main software development of music production computer plus every Sunday night I get to play counterstrike with the boys by dual booting into Windows. I’m able to service repair and upgrade it myself and one day when I’m ready to move on I’ll use it as my home server. The crazy thing is that my next upgrade will be going back to a MacBook Pro most likely because the thunderbolt connectivity will be able to handle the Blackmagic 4 camera broadcast capture card and NVME PCIe storage card that are in my Mac Pro right now through some external enclosure. The only real drawback that I’ve experienced with the Mac Pro has been the lack of support for large language models on the AMD GPU due to Apple's lacklustre metal drivers but I’ve been working with a couple of other developers to port a MoltenVK translation layer to Ollama that enables LLM’s on the GPU. We’re trying to get it on the main branch since testing has gone well. One thing a lot of commenters in this thread are overlooking is that this is the death nell for repairable and upgradable computing for Mac, which is super disappointing.
  - NetMageSCW 6mo ago
    Studios are repairable. Upgrading is being deprecated however, and I’m not sure that’s bad for Apple. It may not be bad for the end user either - it feels like external TB/USB peripherals might have a longer life transferred between computers than an internal PCIe version - and a larger market as they will work with any Mac.
yalogin 6mo ago
Another company would have killed it a long time ago. It lasted this long because it’s Apple.
jasoneckert 6mo ago
As someone who came from the SGI O2/Octane era when high-end workstations were compact, distinctive, and sexy, I’ve never really understood the allure of the Mac Pro, with the exception of the 2013 Mac Pro tube, which I owned (small footprint, quiet, and powerful). For me, aesthetics and size are important. That workstation on your desk should justify its presence, not just exist as some hulking box. When Apple released the Mac Studio, it made perfect sense from a form-factor point-of-view. The internal expansion slots in the M2 Mac Pro didn't make any sense. It was like a bag of potato chips - mostly air. And far too big and ugly to be part of my work area! I'm surprised that Apple didn't discontinue it sooner.
- moogly 6mo ago
  > That workstation on your desk should Under your desk, right? Right?!
  - swiftcoder 6mo ago
    I mean... if you spent $7,000 on it, do you really want to hide it away under the desk?
    - yoz-y 6mo ago
      Yes, because you’re buying a tool, not a conversation piece.
      - swiftcoder 6mo ago
        Por que no los dos? ¯\(ツ)/¯
    - NetMageSCW 6mo ago
      That’s why my Lian Li anniversary edition is next to my desk. Also because it is nearly as tall and wouldn’t fit under it.
  - kgwgk 6mo ago
    It’s a desktop computer, not a deskbottom computer.
ruptwelve 6mo ago
I mean for the cost of the Mac Pro wheels you can get a Macbook Neo these days!
musicale 6mo ago
I feel like Apple is going back to the days of toaster "appliance" Macs. No slots, no upgrades, just buy a new one in 3-7 years.
- steve-atx-7600 6mo ago
  I hate how I can't buy an new apple silicon with upgradeable RAM or SSD. Is there a legit reason why they couldn't make these things upgradeable at all even on a studio machine? 4TB is the smallest SSD I ever want in a new machine, but buying one from Apple is stupidly expensive. Back in the intel days, I'd buy a macbook pro, for example, with less ram and a smaller SSD than the max available and then upgrade to much cheaper aftermarket parts a few years later when prices dropped. I'm still not going to use windows or linux. Don't want to be an IT guy on the side just to keep linux machines working. This may not be obvious to some unless you try to use printers and scanners that are more than 5 years old and what them to be on the network. And, you don't install virtualization tools like vmware that require compiling and loading kernel drivers which ends up being incompatible with new OS releases...etc. Windows is just too much of a painful acceptance of mediocrity and apathy in product design for me.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - aloha2436 6mo ago
    > Is there a legit reason why they couldn't make these things upgradeable at all even on a studio machine? For the SSD, no. For the memory, yes. The memory lives on the same chip as the CPU and the GPU, it's even more tightly bound than just being soldered on. The memory being there has legitimate technical benefits that make it much easier/cheaper for them to reach the extremely high memory bandwidths that they do.
    - lloeki 6mo ago
      This, although it's not merely "easier/cheaper", it's "impossible" (unless you sacrifice a ton of performance) Same reason as a) GDDR on dGPUs (I think I read somewhere that GDDR is very much like regular DDR, just with much tighter paths and thus soldered in) and b) Framework Desktop (performance would reportedly halve if RAM were not soldered) SSD reasons I seem to recall are architectural for security: some parts (controller?) that usually sit on a NVMe SSD are embedded in the SoC next to (or inside?) the secure enclave processor or whatever the equivalent of the T2 thing is in Mx chips, so what you'd swap would be a bank of raw storage chips which don't match the controller.
stego-tech 6mo ago
Not surprising, as the market has broadly moved on from add-in cards in favor of smaller form factors and external devices, absent some notable holdouts in specific verticals. Gonna miss it, though. If they had reduced the add-in card slots to something more reasonable, lowered the entry price, and given us multi-socket options for the CPU (2x M# Ultras? 4x?), it could have been an interesting HPC or server box - though they’ve long since moved away from that in software land, so that was always but a fantasy. At least the Mac Studio and Minis are cute little boxes.
eddie-wang 6mo ago
[dead]
cco 6mo ago
I kinda would have loved a new Mac Pro, same case, but just stick 4 Mac Studios in there and connect them all via MLX. Would be a killer local AI setup...for $40k.
drnick1 6mo ago
This makes sense, for that kind of money you could always build a beastly workstation in a real ATX case with standard components. Install Linux and the Mac looks like an expensive toy in comparison.
chaostheory 6mo ago
The price to value for the Mac Pro kept going down. Mac Studio made more sense.
throwaway85825 6mo ago
For AI Apple internally has rack mounted M chips but they wont sell them to the public.
jeffbee 6mo ago
I guess A/V pros are used to getting screwed constantly, but it must be really irritating to face the prospect of eventually having to move PCI add-in cards to TB5 enclosures that cost $1000 per slot.
- NetMageSCW 6mo ago
  I see retail 3 slots for $1800, so a lot cheaper than you think. They can move to a Studio and buy a box for less than a Mac Pro replacement would cost.
pipeline_peak 6mo ago
Good, Mac Pro was fugly. I like Apple when they make pretty stuff. Especially small, shiny, and quiet.
chatmasta 6mo ago
I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been able to build a PC that outperforms any Apple machine at the same price point. But inference is unique because its performance scales with high memory throughput, and you can’t assemble that by wiring together off the shelf parts in a consumer form factor. It’s simply not possible to DIY a homelab inference server better than the M3+ for inference workloads, at anywhere close to its price point. They are perfectly positioned to capitalize on the next few years of model architecture developments. No wonder they haven’t bothered working on their own foundation models… they can let the rest of the industry do their work for them, and by the time their Gemini licensing deal expires, they’ll have their pick of the best models to embed with their hardware.
- HerbManic 6mo ago
  Jeff Geerling doing that 1.5TB cluster using 4 Mac Studios was pretty much all the proof needed to demo how the Mac Pro is struggling to find any place any more. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/15-tb-vram-on-mac-studio-rdma-over-thunderbolt-5/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/15-tb-vram-on-mac-stu...
  - zozbot234 6mo ago
    But those Thunderbolt links are slower than modern PCIe. If there's actually a M5-based Mac Studio with the same Thunderbolt support, you'll be better off e.g. for LLM inference, streaming read-only model weights from storage as we've seen with recent experiments than pushing the same amount of data via Thunderbolt. It's only if you want to go beyond local memory constraints (e.g. larger contexts) that the Thunderbolt link becomes useful.
    - wpm 6mo ago
      Why everyone wants to live in dongle/external cabling/dock hell is beyond me. PCIe cards are powered internally with no extra cables. They are secure. They do not move or fall off of shit. They do not require cable management or external power supplies. They do not have to talk to the CPU through a stupid USB hub or a Thunderbolt dock. Crappy USB HDMI capture on my Mac led me to running a fucking PC with slots to capture video off of a 50 foot HDMI cable, that then streamed the feed to my Mac from NDI, because it was more reliable than the elgarbo capture dongle I was using. This shit is bad. It sucks. It's twice the price and half the quality of a Blackmagic Design capture card. But, no slots, so I guess I can go get fucked.
hulitu 6mo ago
> Apple discontinues the Mac Pro They replaced it with Mac Neo. Did you notice the wonderful build quality, the accesible price and that everyone is buying it ? And it has USB: U from universal.
mrkpdl 6mo ago
The 2019 Mac Pro’s main purpose was to provide much needed reassurance that Apple cared about the Mac. In prior years the quality of the Macs had fallen over all product lines. And the question of does Apple care about the Mac at all was a legitimate one. This Mac Pro was about resetting and giving a clear signal that Apple was willing to invest in the Mac far more than it was about ‘slots’. Today, Mac hardware is the best it has ever been, and no one is reasonably questioning apple’s commitment to a Mac hardware. So it makes sense for the Mac Pro to make a graceful exit.
- hbn 6mo ago
  The hardware teams have done a great job proving Apple cares about the Mac. It'd be nice if the people in charge of the software would get the message.
- twoodfin 6mo ago
  I also think Apple wasn’t sure 5 years ago that a product like the Mac Studio would be accepted by the market. Memories of the G4 Cube and all… But it’s a great product, does fulfill the bulk of needs for most “Pro” desktop use cases, and what’s left isn’t interesting or profitable enough to sustain a separate product line.
karel-3d 6mo ago
They also discontinued the 1000 dollars Pro Stand, apparently
- karel-3d 6mo ago
  oh and those wheels
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
zer0zzz 6mo ago
It is kind of a bummer they never supported Cuda/HIP GPGPU using those slots.
looopTools 6mo ago
This honestly saddens me a little. From the PowerMac's to the MacPro I always loved them when having the opportunity to work with them. Plus I loved the expandability they offered. I don't find the external GPU houses for Mac Studio as appealing to use.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  They were a great aspirational product in the "when I win the lottery" category.
WesolyKubeczek 6mo ago
Sad. I had this pipe dream of an Apple Silicon system made as a PCIe endpoint, so a Mac Pro could be a coordinator and host to like 4 of such systems in a cluster with very fast interconnect. Imagine the possibilities.
lwhi 6mo ago
Apple need to sort out their software. Mac OS is a horrible experience.
- dwayne_dibley 6mo ago
  Have you seen windows lately? (but yes, Apple seems happy to ship buggy software these days)
  - lwhi 6mo ago
    Sure, Windows is awful, but that's no reason to ship terrible software. Apple's hardware is great, but without choice of software, they need to provide an amazing default option.
andy_ppp 6mo ago
Damn I was hoping they would build proper GPUs at some point.
shevy-java 6mo ago
> It has gone without an update since then, languishing at its $6,999 price point What I find fascinating is how people pay so much for Apple-related products. Perhaps the quality requires a premium (I don't share that opinion, but for the sake of thinking, let's have it as an option here), but this seems more deliberate milking by Apple with such price tags. People must love being milked it seems.
_ph_ 6mo ago
The latest Mac Pro really didn't make much use of its size, as there were too few useful things to put into. Especially as the GPU is now part of the package anyway. Also, the Mac Studio is the perfect workstation for the desk. Still, there are a few things which could be improved relative to the current Studio. First, the ability to easily clean the internals from dust. You should be able to just lift the lid and clean the computer. Also, it would be great to have one Mac which you could just plug in a bunch of NVMe disks. On the other side, they might replace the Mac Pro with a rack mountable machine as the demand for ARM servers in the cloud raises.
- SwtCyber 6mo ago
  Studio for desks, something rackable for scale
sylens 6mo ago
A Mac Pro without external GPU support was always a dumb idea. They just made this to shut up the hard core fans who were complaining about the outdated Mac Pro in 2018.
andrewl-hn 6mo ago
This would probably push some high-end audio professionals away from Logic. One of the niches Mac Pro has been popular is audio production. And with cheesegrader the ability to slot in many-many different audio interfaces into a box instead of dangling out to various PCIe enclosures has been a big win. Here's a good video how it looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I&list=PLi2i2YhL6okTb7-pQbRk9rSWrw0JknLxT&index=4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I&list=PLi2i2YhL6o... (at 1:40 Neil Parfitt shows Mac audio setup his before and after).
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- audunw 6mo ago
  Feels like it'd just create a market for a big rack-mountable multi-bay PCIe enclosure, with its own internal power supply, that you could connect with one ore more thunderbolt cable. I don't see any reason why a solution built around a Mac Studio should have to be significantly more cluttered. I don't know if such a solution exists right now, but I'm thinking there's a fair chance it will soon as the Mac Pro disappearing creates a demand for something like it.
  - bitbckt 6mo ago
    The DAD AX32/AX64 is such a thing.
  - dabockster 6mo ago
    Thunderbolt is really an unsung hero here. It is surprisingly nice to be able to move various components around my desk that would have otherwise sat in a huge tower hogging all the PCIe slots they can find.
    - randusername 6mo ago
      Agreed, I've been doing experiments and it's wild to me what "just works" in a secondhand eGPU case or music production PCIe boxes. Dual 10G NIC cards, way cheaper than a comparable dongle 36 HDDs in JBOD, absolutely! 12 optical drives, sure!
Simulacra 6mo ago
I may be in the minority but I liked the cheese grater, it was a machine I could upgrade and use as a powerful workstation. The trashcan really turned me off of the Mac Pro series. I think Apple really missed an opportunity here, but hope Springs eternal.
stephen_g 6mo ago
I never understood the point of the Mac Pro for the last decade or so - especially after the Mac Studio was released, Apple should have worked out what professionals actually want - basically a Mac Studio but with three or four PCIe slots and a few SSD slots. That’s literally all it should be! The Mac Pro was at the same time bizarrely over the top while also weirdly limited in some ways - while also being way to expensive…
- BillinghamJ 6mo ago
  Isn't that... exactly what the Mac Pro was? PCIe support was the primary point
  - stephen_g 6mo ago
    What I’m trying to say is that with 7 slots and being more than double the size that it needed to be, it was way more machine than 95% of the market who might actually want it would buy, with a price that was correspondingly way too expensive…
- SwtCyber 6mo ago
  [dead]
abmmgb 6mo ago
It seems they are consolidating their proposition and slimming down their pipelines, not a bad thing
SwtCyber 6mo ago
It totally makes sense. Mac Studio basically ate the Mac Pro's lunch. But it's still kind of sad. The Mac Pro used to represent this idea that Apple cared about the absolute high-end, no-compromises workstation crowd
- m132 6mo ago
  Yup, exactly my thoughts. To me, this discontinuation is less about the product and more about making a statement. The M2 Mac Pro was a dysfunctional product of an internal conflict of interests, but it cast a ray of hope that the M series would develop past the current scaled-up-but-still-disposable phone/embedded SoCs and that Apple had some interest in bringing them closer to the offerings of the competitors from the workstation/server market. Now, with this move, they've made it clear that they would rather give up an entire segment than make at least a narrow part of their ecosystem open enough for the PCIe slots of the Mac Pro to find any serious use.
timnetworks 6mo ago
Of course it's Made on iPhone! They stopped making anything else!
razkaplan 6mo ago
[flagged]
BewareTheYiga 6mo ago
I am incredibly saddened that the inevitable finally happened. The OG 5,1 cheese grater sparked so much joy. I added and expanded so much over the years before I finally donated it to a computer museum and moved on to Apple Silicon. I did everything from scientific computing, ripping movies, serving files, running websites, and everything in between.
dhruv3006 6mo ago
I think they have something packing.
ge96 6mo ago
I still remember that $1,000 for a wheel or maybe it was for all 4
arvinsim 6mo ago
The Mac Pro would have been much more popular if MacOS was still compatible with Nvidia GPUs.

666 points by bentocorp 6mo ago

chvid 6mo ago

The only thing that is missing from the current Mac line up is a one rack unit machine.

magarnicle 6mo ago
They had that with the previous gen mini, but the new ones are too tall now.

al_borland 6mo ago

They've been trying to kill the Mac Pro for over a decade. I wonder how long before they backtrack again? It seems like they should at least have a migration path for users who needed the expansion cards the Mac Pro supported. Pushing them to the PC seems pretty bad. Apple's new "Pro" definition seems more like "Prosumer".

bigyabai 6mo ago
The form-factor always felt like a weird fit for Apple Silicon. With the Intel boxes it was understandable; you want a few liters of free space for a couple AMD cards or some transcode hardware. The system was designed to be expandable, and the Mac Pro was the apex of Apple's commitment to that philosophy after bungling the trashcan Mac Pro. None of the Apple Silicon hardware can seemingly justify this form factor, though. The memory isn't serviceable, PCIe devices aren't really supported, the PSU doesn't need much space, and the cooling can be handled with mobile-tier hardware. Apple's migration path is "my way or the highway" for Mac Pro owners.
- redwall_hp 6mo ago
  I suspect we'll start seeing higher-spec Mac Studio options. One of those with an M* Ultra, and some sort of Thunderbolt storage expansion would probably cover most of the Pro's use cases. And Apple probably doesn't want to deal with anything more exotic than those.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    Can't you already stack 4 Studios? Building a $1,000 case to hold them makes some sort of Apple sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4_RsUxRjKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4_RsUxRjKU or something
- al_borland 6mo ago
  Their justification for the form factor, when it was released, was that pro users need various PCI cards to interface with some of their equipment, and this would allow them to do that. It seemed like the guts of the Mac Pro were essentially shoved inside of a box and stuck in the corner of the tower. It would seem like they could decouple it and sell a box that pro users could load cards into (like other companies do for eGPUs). It wouldn’t feel like a very Apple-like setup, but it would function and allow Apple to focus where they want to focus without simply leaving those users behind. I suppose the other option would be to dispense with the smoke and mirrors and let people slot a Mac Studio right into the Mac Pro tower, so it could be upgraded independently of the tower. The alternative is people leave the platform or end up with a bunch of Thunderbolt spaghetti. Neither of which seem ideal.
  - testing22321 6mo ago
    It was always strange the Apple Silicon kept the 1.3kw power supply which was massive overkill. I always hoped we’d get a consumer version of what they have internally - 10 or 20 or more Apple Silicon chips for 1000 cores or so.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      A bunch of the Mac Pro decisions seem to have been more driven by "we have a warehouse of these parts" than "this is what the system needs".
      - dijit 6mo ago
        A lot of Apples offerings feel a bit like that actually. To be expected when lord of the supply chain Tim Cook is running the show.
        NetMageSCW 6mo ago
        Apple doesn’t end up with a lot of parts in warehouses because they control the supply chain so well.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
wmf 6mo ago
The migration path is Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures (basically eGPU enclosures but you don't have to use a GPU).
- bigyabai 6mo ago
  > but you don't have to use a GPU That's a cute way of saying that GPUs aren't supported.
- eigenspace 6mo ago
  Not only are third party GPUs not supported on apple silicon, but thunderbolt has significantly more latency and lower bandwidth than 'real' PCIe implementations, even ones with similarly cut down lanes like oculink. Apple tried before to push everything out into external PCIe enclosures and people hated it. Maybe this'll go differently this time, the Mac Studio is certainly a much more compelling offering than the trashcan Mac Pro. But I think this is still a shitty and painful situation for a lot of specific users.
  - NetMageSCW 6mo ago
    I think “a lot” is heavily exaggerated- more like a few niche users.
    - eigenspace 6mo ago
      Oh yeah, the market for these capabilities is tiny, no doubt. But at least historically, the people that wanted these things tended to be very big lucrative customers, and also tended to be very influential word-of-mouth Apple evangalists. Just as a random personal example, my uncle was an Apple guy since the 80s, and when I was a kid in the early 2000s he always had a Mac Pro, several Macbook pros, and a bunch of other Apple gear. He played a big role in convincing all of his 3 other brothers that Apple was the way to go, and those brothers then raised kids in households with only Apple computers. This uncle is still a mostly Apple user, but he's increasingly pissed at Apple, and definitely no longer evangelical in recommending it to people. He needs to have a linux server machine for his home NAS, and another one for some specialized work applications and it really frustrates him that Apple abandoned his market segment. I think there's a real possibility that if Apple had pissed him off like this in the early 2000s instead of the 2020s, that our wider family might have not ended up as being so Apple centric, so Apple may have missed out on a lot more sales than just a couple of Mac Pros and expensive software licenses.

pjmlp 6mo ago

Now everyone that needs classical workstations can finally move on into Linux or Windows workloads. Believe t-shirts at WWDC were not enough. Thus the workstation market joins OS X Server.

Amorymeltzer 6mo ago
For those who don't know what the t-shirt reference is, it's a creation by John Siracusa/The Accidental Tech Podcast: <https://cottonbureau.com/p/4RUVDA/shirt/mac-pro-believe-dark https://cottonbureau.com/p/4RUVDA/shirt/mac-pro-believe-dark>.
- nosrepa 6mo ago
  And I still don't get it.
  - Amorymeltzer 6mo ago
    Siracusa—probably best known here for doing fabulous OS X reviews for Ars—is a co-host of ATP. He is also known is such circles for having Mac Pros, and using them for a long time (sometimes by choice, sometimes by circumstance). He thinks Apple should make a Mac Pro, not necessarily because it's a big seller, but because he thinks Apple should make a "best computer," much in the same way car companies might make a car that will never sell but pushes engineers, etc. They made a shirt. It was fun.
    - WillAdams 6mo ago
      Ages ago, when new Mac hardware came out, I'd amuse myself by putting together an "ultimate Mac workstation" in the configurator --- once upon a time, one could hit 6 figures pretty easily --- these days, well I panic bought a duplicate computer because I was worried a chipped/cracked display was going to make it unusable (turns out a screen protector has worked thus far). I agree with the reasoning, and would like to see Apple continue to make aspirational hardware, but maybe the mainstream stuff is good enough?

w-m 6mo ago

While the trash can generation was somewhat present and around, I don't think I ever saw a cheese grater in the flesh. Did it have any users? Were there any actual useful expansion cards? Did anybody continue buying this at all, after it didn't get the M3 Ultra bump, that the Mac Studio got last year?

m463 6mo ago
The cheese grater mac pros were very popular, in that people got them and continued to use them. The most notable feature was that there were mac-specific graphics cards, and you could also run PC graphics cards (without a nice boot screen). They had a 1.4kw power supply I believe, and there was extra pcie power for higher-end graphics cards. You could upgrade the memory, add up to 6 or more sata hard disks (2 in dvd slot). You could run windows, dual booting if you wanted and apple supported the drivers. The 2013 was kind of a joke. small and quiet, but expansion was minimal. 2019 looked beefy, but the expansion was more like a cash register for apple, not really democratic. There were 3rd party sata hard disk solutions, the 2023 model was basically a joke. I think maybe the pcie slots were ok for nvme cards, not a lot else (unless apple made it). nowadays an apple computer is more like an iphone - apple would prefer if everything was welded shut.
- hbn 6mo ago
  > nowadays an apple computer is more like an iphone - apple would prefer if everything was welded shut. Funny timing to say that https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-repairable-macbook-in-14-years https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-r...
waz0wski 6mo ago
I just replaced a 2009 MacPro It had many hardware upgrades over the years - upgraded CPUs, 128GB RAM, 4TB NVME storage, a modern AMD GPU, USB3/c, thunderbolt, etc The only reason it got replaced is because it became too much of a PITA to keep modern OSX running on it (via OCLP) Replaced with an M4 Max Mac Studio, which is a nice and faster machine but with no ability to upgrade anything and much worse hardware resale value on M-series I'll have to replace it in 2-3 years

dangus 6mo ago

> Serviceable, repairable, upgradable Macs are officially a thing of the past. Well, not exactly. Apple’s desktop Macs actually all have modular SSD storage, and third parties sell upgrade kits. And it’s not like Thunderbolt is a slouch as far as expandability. I can see why the Mac Pro is gone. Yeah, it has PCIe slots…that I don’t really think anyone is using. It’s not like you can drop an RTX 5090 in there. The latest Mac Pro didn’t have upgradable memory so it wasn’t much different than a Mac Studio with a bunch of empty space inside. The Mac Studio is very obviously a better buy for someone looking for a system like that. It’s just hard to imagine who the Mac Pro is for at its pricing and size. I think what happened is that the Studio totally cannibalized Mac Pro sales.

bigyabai 6mo ago
> Apple’s desktop Macs actually all have modular SSD storage "Modular" does not mean that it's serviceable, repairable or upgradable. Apple's refusal to adopt basic M.2 spec is a pretty glaring example of that.
- internet2000 6mo ago
  > Apple's refusal to adopt basic M.2 spec I get the ideological angle, but in practical terms that's not a barrier: https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-apple-ssd-adapter.html?spm=a2g0o.home.search.0 https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-apple-ssd-adapter.html...
  - bigyabai 6mo ago
    This is the USB-C dongle argument all over again, but with a proprietary connector that a total of one (1) company uses.
    - dijit 6mo ago
      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, but A) 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. if we're talking about Intel era Macs then that proprietary connector predates M.2 entirely and is actually even thinner and smaller (which is pretty important when the primary use-cases is thin-and-lights); though I suppose that the adapter fits is a sign that it would have been possible to use a larger connector...

brailsafe 6mo ago

Pour one out for John Siracusa

sgerenser 6mo ago
I guess not enough people bought the shirt: https://cottonbureau.com/p/4RUVDA/shirt/mac-pro-believe-dark#/30018634/tee-men-premium-lightweight-vintage-royal-tri-blend-s https://cottonbureau.com/p/4RUVDA/shirt/mac-pro-believe-dark...
- bombcar 6mo ago
  Is it strange that only now do I want the shirt?
  - brailsafe 6mo ago
    I think we're all there with you :)
    - wpm 6mo ago
      They better do another run.
      - brailsafe 6mo ago
        Mac Pro... We Believed
- philistine 6mo ago
  Or too many people bought the shirt instead of a Mac Pro.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    The shirt was a bit cheaper. And probably a bit faster processing, too.
6mo ago

internet2000 6mo ago

I hope I can get a cheap one on Craigslist eventually, just for the novelty. It looks so cool.

spot 6mo ago
[flagged]
- testing22321 6mo ago
  Burn more power for a slower computer! That’ll shoe em.
  - angoragoats 6mo ago
    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.
    - hu3 6mo ago
      Can confirm. I have a Ryzen 9800X3D with RTX 5070, 128GB of RAM and TBs of Gen 5.0 NVMes. Not only it is screamingly fast (the fastest on earth for some workloads), but I can upgrade it easily. And is dead silent too. The best thing is it runs native Linux and it just works.

longislandguido 6mo ago

Apple betrayed their pro customers years ago—right around the time they went to version X of the Pro apps—it's all been a slow death by a thousand paper cuts since then. The money's all in selling phones to teen girls now, and taking their mafia cut of app store sales.

IFC_LLC 6mo ago

I think that's an expected thing. G5 was the thing. And companies were buying G5 and other macs like that all the time, because you were able to actually extend it with video cards and some special equipment. But now we have M chips. You don't need video for M chips. You kinda do, but truthfully, it's cheaper to buy a beefier Mac than to install a video card. Pro was a great thing for designers and video editors, those freaks who need to color-calibrate monitors. And right now even mini works just fine for that. And as for extensions - gone are the days of PCIe. Audio cards and other specialized equipment works and lives just fine on USB-C and Thunderbolt. I remember how many months I've spent trying to make Creative Labs Sound Blaster to work on my 486 computer. At that time you had to have a card to extend your system. Right now I'm using Scarlett 2i2 from Focusrite. It works over USB-C with my iPhone, iPad and Mac. DJIs mics work just as good. Damn, you can buy Oscilloscope that works over USB-C or network. It's not the Mac's or Apple's fault. We are actually live in the age where systems are quite independent and do not require direct installations.

Lucasoato 6mo ago
Scarlett 2i2 has been amazing for me, I’d say unbeatable in terms of quality/price ratio.
magic_hamster 6mo ago
> gone are the days of PCIe. My GPU, NVMe drives and motherboard might disagree.
- aprilnya 6mo ago
  - 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?
  - HeWhoLurksLate 6mo ago
    but what about second GPU?

longislandguido 6mo ago

[flagged]

chasingtheflow 6mo ago
Except by most all regards that product is great.
- longislandguido 6mo ago
  By "great" do you mean 8GB of non-upgradable soldered RAM in 2026?
  - testing22321 6mo ago
    That handily edits multiple 4K streams
    - longislandguido 6mo ago
      [flagged]
      - rogerrogerr 6mo ago
        > 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.
        bigyabai 6mo ago
        > but approximately everyone else in the low-end laptop market will. No, they won't. People repeat this, but Macs constitute a minority of the low-end market and will continue to for the foreseeable future. This has been the case when $400 Retina Intel Macbooks were flooding the used market; it was the case when Costco sold $700 M1 MBAs. If you cannot extrapolate what will happen with the $600 laptop, then I don't think you have payed attention to what the market is buying.

openports 6mo ago

R.I.P. to the cheese grater

lapcat 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
The studio is also like 5x as fast as those machines.
- lapcat 6mo ago
  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.
longislandguido 6mo ago
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.
SpecialistK 6mo ago
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.

giancarlostoro 6mo ago

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

therealmarv 6mo ago
but even that one looks kinda outdated when looking at latest M5 Max laptops.
- jshier 6mo ago
  Mac Studio waits for the Ultra chips to ship, which are always last in a generation. Perhaps the M5's chiplet architecture will help them move faster there.

GeekyBear 6mo ago

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_M5 https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M5 So 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.

muro 6mo ago
Or it could be the same CPU as in pro/max with more GPU chiplets.
- GeekyBear 6mo ago
  Sure. AI workloads would really benefit from having more RAM, GPU cores, and memory channels.
  - bigyabai 6mo ago
    Something tells me this mentality is how Apple ended up with thousands of idling Private Cloud Compute servers. But sure, more GPU cores will definitely fix it this time.

system2 6mo ago

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.

giantrobot 6mo ago
If you spend $35k and just idle the machine or just check e-mail you've burnt the money. If it's your work machine and you've got a $100/hr billable rate it's paid for in a little over a month. Three months at a $50/hr rate. If you bought the $35k Mac Pro in 2023 when it was released and have a $50/hr rate it's been paid off for about 30 months. So as of today those owners probably aren't too broken hearted. They'll likely get at least another three years out of them. People buying $35k Mac Pros probably paid them off after a single contract. So they've just been making money rather than costing money.
- klausa 6mo ago
  >If it's your work machine and you've got a $100/hr billable rate it's paid for in a little over a month. Are you working 996 weeks or something? At standard 40h work-week the math works out to 8.75 weeks to "pay for itself".
  - bluedino 6mo ago
    What if that machine lets you do your job 4x faster?
    - klausa 6mo ago
      I don’t think working faster 4x makes you experience time dilation to the degree that you experience 8.75 weeks as 4 in your frame of reference; but my relativity math is a bit rusty, I could be wrong.
- gjm11 6mo ago
  I think these calculations are a bit bogus. If you spend $35k on a nice computer, and then earn $35k from doing some work using it, that doesn't mean that buying the computer has paid for itself unless the computer is solely responsible for that income. It probably isn't. It's not necessarily even true that after doing that work it's "paid for", in the sense that getting the $35k income means that you were able to afford the $35k computer: that only follows if you didn't need any of that income for other luxuries, such as food and shelter. If you're earning $50/hour, 40hr/week then what you've done after 17.5 weeks is earned enough to buy that $35k computer. Assuming you don't need any of that money for anything else, like food and shelter. If the fancy computer helps you get that income then of course it's perfectly legit to estimate how much difference it makes and decide it pays for itself, but it's not as simple as comparing the price of the computer with your total income. Regardless of how much it contributes, if you have plenty of money then it's also perfectly legit to say "I can comfortably afford this and I want it so I'll but it" but, again, it's not as simple as comparing the price of the computer with your total income.

ks2048 6mo ago

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.

bombcar 6mo ago
The problem is that the M1 chips foretold the doom of the Mac Pro unless they could figure out some way to do something that you couldn't do with a Mac Studio - thunderbolt is so good that it's hard to justify anything else. If they had done more with NUMA in the M series maybe you could have a Mac Pro with M5 Ultras that can take a number of M5 "daughter cards" that do something useful.

readitalready 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
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 to do. 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. Such a lack of vision. And thus Nvidia is, now quite durably, the most valuable company in the world. Imagine telling that to a time traveler from 2018.
- readitalready 6mo ago
  I think for AMD, they were focused on competing against Intel. Remember AMD was almost bankrupt about 15 years ago because of competing against Intel. But the very first GPU use for AI was actually with an ATI/AMD GPU, not an Nvidia one. Everyone thinks Nvidia kicked off the GPU AI craze when Ilya Sutskever cleaned up on AlexNet with an Nvidia GPU back in 2012, or when Andrew Ng and team at Stanford published their "Large Scale Deep Unsupervised Learning using Graphics Processors" in 2009, but in 2004, a couple of Korean researchers were the first to implement neural networks on a GPU, using ATI Radeons: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031320304000524 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00313... And as of now I do believe AMD is in the second strongest position in the datacenter space after Nvidia, ahead of even Google.
- bigstrat2003 6mo ago
  > And thus Nvidia is, now quite durably, the most valuable company in the world. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world right up until the AI bubble pops. Which, while it's hard to nail down when, is going to happen. I wouldn't call their position durable at all.

BirAdam 6mo ago

Reading comments, I don’t think people are being completely fair here. For Intel and AMD to approach what Apple has accomplished they’re making many of the same compromises with Panther Lake and Ryzen AI Max. Apple chose to put disk controllers on their SoP rather than having them on the storage module. This shaves a tiny bit of latency. Worth it? No idea. I’m shit at hardware design. As for not having a Pro or otherwise expandable system? It’s shit. They make several variations of their chips, and I don’t think it would hurt them to make an SoP for a socket, put a giant cooling system in it, and give it 10 or 12 PCIe slots. As for what would go in those slots? Make this beast rack mountable and people would toss better network cards, sound/video output or capture, storage controllers, and all kinds of other things in there. A key here would be to not charge so much just because they can. Make the price reasonable.

bombcar 6mo ago
They have tried variations of this since time immemorial (we can argue about "price reasonablé") but there's just not much you can do with it that you can't do much cheaper or simpler in other ways. The Xserve has been dead for 15 years now, and it was never tremendously amazing (though it was nice kit). Apple apparently has some sort of "in-house" xserve-like thing they don't sell; but turning that into a product would likely be more useful than a Mac Pro, unless they add NUMA or some other way of allowing an M5 to access racks and racks of DIMMs.
- matthewfcarlson 6mo ago
  WSJ recently did a thing about it but details were rather light

karim79 6mo ago

I have three of the trash can ones. They are absolute pieces of art, as useless as they are computationally these days (energy-to-performance wise at least). I will never sell nor give them away.

adolph 6mo ago

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

bredren 6mo ago

I’m much less concerned about the Mac Pro and more concerned we won’t see an XDR Ultra Display to replace the 32”.

matthewfcarlson 6mo ago
They did come out with a new XDR. It’s just not 32”.

lukeh 6mo ago

Still rocking a 2019 (Intel) Mac Pro here, all slots filled with various Pro Tools and UAD DSP cards, SSD, GPU, etc. I'm planning to get as much mileage out of it as I can. I'm sure a Studio would be more performant, but the Thunderbolt to PCIe chassis are not cheap.

alifeinbinary 6mo ago
i’m in the same boat. I bought mine back in 2021 and honestly I don’t regret my decision. It’s my main software development of music production computer plus every Sunday night I get to play counterstrike with the boys by dual booting into Windows. I’m able to service repair and upgrade it myself and one day when I’m ready to move on I’ll use it as my home server. The crazy thing is that my next upgrade will be going back to a MacBook Pro most likely because the thunderbolt connectivity will be able to handle the Blackmagic 4 camera broadcast capture card and NVME PCIe storage card that are in my Mac Pro right now through some external enclosure. The only real drawback that I’ve experienced with the Mac Pro has been the lack of support for large language models on the AMD GPU due to Apple's lacklustre metal drivers but I’ve been working with a couple of other developers to port a MoltenVK translation layer to Ollama that enables LLM’s on the GPU. We’re trying to get it on the main branch since testing has gone well. One thing a lot of commenters in this thread are overlooking is that this is the death nell for repairable and upgradable computing for Mac, which is super disappointing.
- NetMageSCW 6mo ago
  Studios are repairable. Upgrading is being deprecated however, and I’m not sure that’s bad for Apple. It may not be bad for the end user either - it feels like external TB/USB peripherals might have a longer life transferred between computers than an internal PCIe version - and a larger market as they will work with any Mac.

yalogin 6mo ago

Another company would have killed it a long time ago. It lasted this long because it’s Apple.

jasoneckert 6mo ago

As someone who came from the SGI O2/Octane era when high-end workstations were compact, distinctive, and sexy, I’ve never really understood the allure of the Mac Pro, with the exception of the 2013 Mac Pro tube, which I owned (small footprint, quiet, and powerful). For me, aesthetics and size are important. That workstation on your desk should justify its presence, not just exist as some hulking box. When Apple released the Mac Studio, it made perfect sense from a form-factor point-of-view. The internal expansion slots in the M2 Mac Pro didn't make any sense. It was like a bag of potato chips - mostly air. And far too big and ugly to be part of my work area! I'm surprised that Apple didn't discontinue it sooner.

moogly 6mo ago
> That workstation on your desk should Under your desk, right? Right?!
- swiftcoder 6mo ago
  I mean... if you spent $7,000 on it, do you really want to hide it away under the desk?
  - yoz-y 6mo ago
    Yes, because you’re buying a tool, not a conversation piece.
    - swiftcoder 6mo ago
      Por que no los dos? ¯\(ツ)/¯
  - NetMageSCW 6mo ago
    That’s why my Lian Li anniversary edition is next to my desk. Also because it is nearly as tall and wouldn’t fit under it.
- kgwgk 6mo ago
  It’s a desktop computer, not a deskbottom computer.

ruptwelve 6mo ago

I mean for the cost of the Mac Pro wheels you can get a Macbook Neo these days!

musicale 6mo ago

I feel like Apple is going back to the days of toaster "appliance" Macs. No slots, no upgrades, just buy a new one in 3-7 years.

steve-atx-7600 6mo ago
I hate how I can't buy an new apple silicon with upgradeable RAM or SSD. Is there a legit reason why they couldn't make these things upgradeable at all even on a studio machine? 4TB is the smallest SSD I ever want in a new machine, but buying one from Apple is stupidly expensive. Back in the intel days, I'd buy a macbook pro, for example, with less ram and a smaller SSD than the max available and then upgrade to much cheaper aftermarket parts a few years later when prices dropped. I'm still not going to use windows or linux. Don't want to be an IT guy on the side just to keep linux machines working. This may not be obvious to some unless you try to use printers and scanners that are more than 5 years old and what them to be on the network. And, you don't install virtualization tools like vmware that require compiling and loading kernel drivers which ends up being incompatible with new OS releases...etc. Windows is just too much of a painful acceptance of mediocrity and apathy in product design for me.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- aloha2436 6mo ago
  > Is there a legit reason why they couldn't make these things upgradeable at all even on a studio machine? For the SSD, no. For the memory, yes. The memory lives on the same chip as the CPU and the GPU, it's even more tightly bound than just being soldered on. The memory being there has legitimate technical benefits that make it much easier/cheaper for them to reach the extremely high memory bandwidths that they do.
  - lloeki 6mo ago
    This, although it's not merely "easier/cheaper", it's "impossible" (unless you sacrifice a ton of performance) Same reason as a) GDDR on dGPUs (I think I read somewhere that GDDR is very much like regular DDR, just with much tighter paths and thus soldered in) and b) Framework Desktop (performance would reportedly halve if RAM were not soldered) SSD reasons I seem to recall are architectural for security: some parts (controller?) that usually sit on a NVMe SSD are embedded in the SoC next to (or inside?) the secure enclave processor or whatever the equivalent of the T2 thing is in Mx chips, so what you'd swap would be a bank of raw storage chips which don't match the controller.

stego-tech 6mo ago

Not surprising, as the market has broadly moved on from add-in cards in favor of smaller form factors and external devices, absent some notable holdouts in specific verticals. Gonna miss it, though. If they had reduced the add-in card slots to something more reasonable, lowered the entry price, and given us multi-socket options for the CPU (2x M# Ultras? 4x?), it could have been an interesting HPC or server box - though they’ve long since moved away from that in software land, so that was always but a fantasy. At least the Mac Studio and Minis are cute little boxes.

eddie-wang 6mo ago

[dead]

cco 6mo ago

I kinda would have loved a new Mac Pro, same case, but just stick 4 Mac Studios in there and connect them all via MLX. Would be a killer local AI setup...for $40k.

drnick1 6mo ago

This makes sense, for that kind of money you could always build a beastly workstation in a real ATX case with standard components. Install Linux and the Mac looks like an expensive toy in comparison.

chaostheory 6mo ago

The price to value for the Mac Pro kept going down. Mac Studio made more sense.

throwaway85825 6mo ago

For AI Apple internally has rack mounted M chips but they wont sell them to the public.

jeffbee 6mo ago

I guess A/V pros are used to getting screwed constantly, but it must be really irritating to face the prospect of eventually having to move PCI add-in cards to TB5 enclosures that cost $1000 per slot.

NetMageSCW 6mo ago
I see retail 3 slots for $1800, so a lot cheaper than you think. They can move to a Studio and buy a box for less than a Mac Pro replacement would cost.

pipeline_peak 6mo ago

Good, Mac Pro was fugly. I like Apple when they make pretty stuff. Especially small, shiny, and quiet.

chatmasta 6mo ago

I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been able to build a PC that outperforms any Apple machine at the same price point. But inference is unique because its performance scales with high memory throughput, and you can’t assemble that by wiring together off the shelf parts in a consumer form factor. It’s simply not possible to DIY a homelab inference server better than the M3+ for inference workloads, at anywhere close to its price point. They are perfectly positioned to capitalize on the next few years of model architecture developments. No wonder they haven’t bothered working on their own foundation models… they can let the rest of the industry do their work for them, and by the time their Gemini licensing deal expires, they’ll have their pick of the best models to embed with their hardware.

HerbManic 6mo ago
Jeff Geerling doing that 1.5TB cluster using 4 Mac Studios was pretty much all the proof needed to demo how the Mac Pro is struggling to find any place any more. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/15-tb-vram-on-mac-studio-rdma-over-thunderbolt-5/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/15-tb-vram-on-mac-stu...
- zozbot234 6mo ago
  But those Thunderbolt links are slower than modern PCIe. If there's actually a M5-based Mac Studio with the same Thunderbolt support, you'll be better off e.g. for LLM inference, streaming read-only model weights from storage as we've seen with recent experiments than pushing the same amount of data via Thunderbolt. It's only if you want to go beyond local memory constraints (e.g. larger contexts) that the Thunderbolt link becomes useful.
  - wpm 6mo ago
    Why everyone wants to live in dongle/external cabling/dock hell is beyond me. PCIe cards are powered internally with no extra cables. They are secure. They do not move or fall off of shit. They do not require cable management or external power supplies. They do not have to talk to the CPU through a stupid USB hub or a Thunderbolt dock. Crappy USB HDMI capture on my Mac led me to running a fucking PC with slots to capture video off of a 50 foot HDMI cable, that then streamed the feed to my Mac from NDI, because it was more reliable than the elgarbo capture dongle I was using. This shit is bad. It sucks. It's twice the price and half the quality of a Blackmagic Design capture card. But, no slots, so I guess I can go get fucked.

hulitu 6mo ago

> Apple discontinues the Mac Pro They replaced it with Mac Neo. Did you notice the wonderful build quality, the accesible price and that everyone is buying it ? And it has USB: U from universal.

mrkpdl 6mo ago

The 2019 Mac Pro’s main purpose was to provide much needed reassurance that Apple cared about the Mac. In prior years the quality of the Macs had fallen over all product lines. And the question of does Apple care about the Mac at all was a legitimate one. This Mac Pro was about resetting and giving a clear signal that Apple was willing to invest in the Mac far more than it was about ‘slots’. Today, Mac hardware is the best it has ever been, and no one is reasonably questioning apple’s commitment to a Mac hardware. So it makes sense for the Mac Pro to make a graceful exit.

hbn 6mo ago
The hardware teams have done a great job proving Apple cares about the Mac. It'd be nice if the people in charge of the software would get the message.
twoodfin 6mo ago
I also think Apple wasn’t sure 5 years ago that a product like the Mac Studio would be accepted by the market. Memories of the G4 Cube and all… But it’s a great product, does fulfill the bulk of needs for most “Pro” desktop use cases, and what’s left isn’t interesting or profitable enough to sustain a separate product line.

karel-3d 6mo ago

They also discontinued the 1000 dollars Pro Stand, apparently

karel-3d 6mo ago
oh and those wheels

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

zer0zzz 6mo ago

It is kind of a bummer they never supported Cuda/HIP GPGPU using those slots.

looopTools 6mo ago

This honestly saddens me a little. From the PowerMac's to the MacPro I always loved them when having the opportunity to work with them. Plus I loved the expandability they offered. I don't find the external GPU houses for Mac Studio as appealing to use.

bombcar 6mo ago
They were a great aspirational product in the "when I win the lottery" category.

WesolyKubeczek 6mo ago

Sad. I had this pipe dream of an Apple Silicon system made as a PCIe endpoint, so a Mac Pro could be a coordinator and host to like 4 of such systems in a cluster with very fast interconnect. Imagine the possibilities.

lwhi 6mo ago

Apple need to sort out their software. Mac OS is a horrible experience.

dwayne_dibley 6mo ago
Have you seen windows lately? (but yes, Apple seems happy to ship buggy software these days)
- lwhi 6mo ago
  Sure, Windows is awful, but that's no reason to ship terrible software. Apple's hardware is great, but without choice of software, they need to provide an amazing default option.

andy_ppp 6mo ago

Damn I was hoping they would build proper GPUs at some point.

shevy-java 6mo ago

> It has gone without an update since then, languishing at its $6,999 price point What I find fascinating is how people pay so much for Apple-related products. Perhaps the quality requires a premium (I don't share that opinion, but for the sake of thinking, let's have it as an option here), but this seems more deliberate milking by Apple with such price tags. People must love being milked it seems.

_ph_ 6mo ago

The latest Mac Pro really didn't make much use of its size, as there were too few useful things to put into. Especially as the GPU is now part of the package anyway. Also, the Mac Studio is the perfect workstation for the desk. Still, there are a few things which could be improved relative to the current Studio. First, the ability to easily clean the internals from dust. You should be able to just lift the lid and clean the computer. Also, it would be great to have one Mac which you could just plug in a bunch of NVMe disks. On the other side, they might replace the Mac Pro with a rack mountable machine as the demand for ARM servers in the cloud raises.

SwtCyber 6mo ago
Studio for desks, something rackable for scale

sylens 6mo ago

A Mac Pro without external GPU support was always a dumb idea. They just made this to shut up the hard core fans who were complaining about the outdated Mac Pro in 2018.

andrewl-hn 6mo ago

This would probably push some high-end audio professionals away from Logic. One of the niches Mac Pro has been popular is audio production. And with cheesegrader the ability to slot in many-many different audio interfaces into a box instead of dangling out to various PCIe enclosures has been a big win. Here's a good video how it looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I&list=PLi2i2YhL6okTb7-pQbRk9rSWrw0JknLxT&index=4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I&list=PLi2i2YhL6o... (at 1:40 Neil Parfitt shows Mac audio setup his before and after).

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
audunw 6mo ago
Feels like it'd just create a market for a big rack-mountable multi-bay PCIe enclosure, with its own internal power supply, that you could connect with one ore more thunderbolt cable. I don't see any reason why a solution built around a Mac Studio should have to be significantly more cluttered. I don't know if such a solution exists right now, but I'm thinking there's a fair chance it will soon as the Mac Pro disappearing creates a demand for something like it.
- bitbckt 6mo ago
  The DAD AX32/AX64 is such a thing.
- dabockster 6mo ago
  Thunderbolt is really an unsung hero here. It is surprisingly nice to be able to move various components around my desk that would have otherwise sat in a huge tower hogging all the PCIe slots they can find.
  - randusername 6mo ago
    Agreed, I've been doing experiments and it's wild to me what "just works" in a secondhand eGPU case or music production PCIe boxes. Dual 10G NIC cards, way cheaper than a comparable dongle 36 HDDs in JBOD, absolutely! 12 optical drives, sure!

Simulacra 6mo ago

I may be in the minority but I liked the cheese grater, it was a machine I could upgrade and use as a powerful workstation. The trashcan really turned me off of the Mac Pro series. I think Apple really missed an opportunity here, but hope Springs eternal.

stephen_g 6mo ago

I never understood the point of the Mac Pro for the last decade or so - especially after the Mac Studio was released, Apple should have worked out what professionals actually want - basically a Mac Studio but with three or four PCIe slots and a few SSD slots. That’s literally all it should be! The Mac Pro was at the same time bizarrely over the top while also weirdly limited in some ways - while also being way to expensive…

BillinghamJ 6mo ago
Isn't that... exactly what the Mac Pro was? PCIe support was the primary point
- stephen_g 6mo ago
  What I’m trying to say is that with 7 slots and being more than double the size that it needed to be, it was way more machine than 95% of the market who might actually want it would buy, with a price that was correspondingly way too expensive…
SwtCyber 6mo ago
[dead]

abmmgb 6mo ago

It seems they are consolidating their proposition and slimming down their pipelines, not a bad thing

SwtCyber 6mo ago

It totally makes sense. Mac Studio basically ate the Mac Pro's lunch. But it's still kind of sad. The Mac Pro used to represent this idea that Apple cared about the absolute high-end, no-compromises workstation crowd

m132 6mo ago
Yup, exactly my thoughts. To me, this discontinuation is less about the product and more about making a statement. The M2 Mac Pro was a dysfunctional product of an internal conflict of interests, but it cast a ray of hope that the M series would develop past the current scaled-up-but-still-disposable phone/embedded SoCs and that Apple had some interest in bringing them closer to the offerings of the competitors from the workstation/server market. Now, with this move, they've made it clear that they would rather give up an entire segment than make at least a narrow part of their ecosystem open enough for the PCIe slots of the Mac Pro to find any serious use.

timnetworks 6mo ago

Of course it's Made on iPhone! They stopped making anything else!

razkaplan 6mo ago

[flagged]

BewareTheYiga 6mo ago

I am incredibly saddened that the inevitable finally happened. The OG 5,1 cheese grater sparked so much joy. I added and expanded so much over the years before I finally donated it to a computer museum and moved on to Apple Silicon. I did everything from scientific computing, ripping movies, serving files, running websites, and everything in between.

dhruv3006 6mo ago

I think they have something packing.

ge96 6mo ago

I still remember that $1,000 for a wheel or maybe it was for all 4

arvinsim 6mo ago

The Mac Pro would have been much more popular if MacOS was still compatible with Nvidia GPUs.