Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

al_borland

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".

pjmlp

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.

w-m

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?

dangus

> 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.

brailsafe

Pour one out for John Siracusa

internet2000

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

longislandguido

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

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.

longislandguido

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

openports

R.I.P. to the cheese grater

lapcat

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

giancarlostoro

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

GeekyBear

The Ultra variants of the M series chips had previously consisted of two of the Max chips bonded together. The M5 generation Pro and Max chips have moved to a chiplet based architecture, with all the CPU cores on one chiplet, and all the GPU cores on another. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_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.

system2

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

ks2048

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

readitalready

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

BirAdam

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.

karim79

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

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

lukeh

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.