The Mac Pro has always been the cream of the crop in terms of performance. That’s why its transition to Apple Silicon has been so highly anticipated over these past couple years.
But with the latest reports pointing to yet another delay, it’s time to get serious about whether or not an Apple Silicon Mac Pro make any sense at all in the new lineup Apple has created. Given the situation, maybe it’s time for Apple to kiss this design goodbye for good.
Apple Silicon modularity doesn’t work
The Mac Pro is the opposite of everything that makes the Apple Silicon Macs work. It was reintroduced in 2019 as not only the most powerful Mac in the lineup — but also the most modular. This was Apple’s take on a traditional desktop tower, meaning many of the components could be upgraded, repaired, or replaced with ease.
That’s the antithesis of what the Apple Silicon design ethos stands for. These highly efficient chips contain everything in one, including graphics and memory. By design, nothing can be upgraded by the user.
And according to the latest reports, Apple’s plan was to use an Apple Silicon chip in an updated Mac Pro, while removing the ability to upgrade graphics. While storage would still be able to be upgraded, by the logic of the design of Apple Silicon, it’s hard to imagine how memory could be upgradeable. Without this kind of modularity, one of the primary selling points of the Mac Pro is out the window — and the very idea already has Pro users frustrated.
All that’s left, in this case, is better performance. But even that may be in jeopardy.
The elephant in the room
Apple announced the Mac Studio last spring, and the brand new desktop in the lineup certainly felt like a proper replacement of both the 27-inch iMac and the Mac Pro. With it, the M1 Ultra, the most powerful configuration of the M1 we’d ever seen, made its debut. The M1 Ultra was made by stitching together two sides of the M1 Max die, packaged using the company’s UltraFusion technology. The result was incredible performance, especially on the graphics front, with up to 64 GPU cores.
Despite that fact, Apple insisted at that very same event that the Mac Pro was, indeed, still in the works. At the time, we all took that to mean Apple had some kind of more powerful chip in the works, which became known in the rumor mill as the M1 Extreme. Some reports indicated that sort of M1 Extreme was being engineered, but as the delays mounted, it became clear that such a chip wasn’t making the cut after all. All the while, Apple executives continued to commit to the idea that the Apple Silicon Mac Pro was coming.