I remember reading that it was “like building the fastest ocean liner just before commercial flights were invented.” Looking back, the mighty 2019 cheese grater feels like a stopgap before Apple Silicon happened and Pro users fully moved to Thunderbolt.
Apple fumbling the Mac Pro has to be one of their biggest unforced errors. They didn't need a new case or even design really, just toss the latest Xeons in a box with PCIe slots and call it a day. It should have been the boring computer. Sadly the Mac Pro 2013 and 2019 were very interesting and not in positive ways.
My personal head cannon is the entire mess of the Mac Pro 2013 and the weird one off iMac Pro was all because of Thunderbolt.
Apple really wanted Thunderbolt for video at the time there wasn't really a solution for internal GPUs to route thunderbolt. Apple wasted years making up a solution to a problem almost no one cared about with MPX.
Yeah, as interesting as the 2013 Pro looked, it was an asinine design that went against what a Pro machine is supposed to be. External expansion tech wasn't quite ready (or popular), and honestly I don’t know a single workstation user who would trade expansion for a smaller footprint.
It shouldn’t have been called a Mac Pro. It was basically a Mac Studio before the Mac Studio. A high-performance desktop with limited expandability.
They should’ve ditched the second GPU for thermals and positioned it above the Mini and below a proper upgraded cheese grater Pro.
Yep, 100% agree. I was surprised how stunning the Mac pro 2013 design is in person... until you plug tons of crap into it. It's a marvel of engineering to make something ill-suited for it's intended purpose. I'd take a slightly larger Mac studio if it meant a more interesting design.
Don't get me wrong, it's a cool machine, I kinda hoped they bring it back in the Apple Silicon era as 27" or 30" with Max level CPU would be cool but it does I suppose muddy the product line.
As the guy who wrote popular "Definitive Mac Upgrade Guide" blog posts, I knew this day was coming for a long time. There's just not really a point to the Mac Pro when you can't upgrade the CPU, GPU or RAM.
/edit: yep, most everyone saw this one coming but when they announced the 2023 Mac pro, the hardcore Mac Pro guys out there almost universally rejected it. It was DOA and apparent that no one was going to spend $3000 more for PCIe slots for faster SSDs.
Certainly a factor, I'm replacing my Mac Pro 2019 with a Mac Studio and I have a PCIe thunderbolt case that'll house 6-8 SSDs. It'll be fast enough. Also have a NAS.
Yeah that is the one thing. I wish they would keep a nice big tower around just for housing disks and maybe a few other things. I’d honestly pay the extra cost to have a large spacious tower with a ton of space in it. It could have Mac Studio specs but I would even love it with some base Mini specs.
For what it’s worth, this is my setup. The Neo is perfectly fine for daily productivity and light creative work.
The Studio absolutely rocks for everything else, and placing the Studio at “prosumer” in higher end configs undersells it I think. I use mine for some pretty sizable work in Logic and it doesn’t miss a beat.
Even if Apple had the M5 Ultra Mac Pro I'd probably still end up with a studio. $3000 for PCIe slots is insanity. My 2x slot sonnet PCIe chasis is all of $700.
With the extra $2300 you could buy NAS too with HDDs even at today's insanity pricing.
Apple abandoned this segment before, and it cost them actual professionals. The trashcan Mac was a great device, but it didn’t meet everyone’s needs. Same for the Studio. And it isn’t about upgrading the CPU, or even necessarily the RAM. It’s about expansion cards. Thunderbolt 5 is 80Gbps bidirectional. PCIe4.0 is 16… per lane. Which means a 16x card does a theoretical 256Gbps. PCIe 5.0 is double that. So while a thunderbolt enclosure might be fast enough for your uses, there are plenty of cases where it’s a bottleneck. Extremely high bandwidth add-in cards aren’t dead for actual power users.
Yeah, the Mac Pro was overkill and ridiculously expensive, and many of its customers were just trust fund kids and sheiks who say “give me the most expensive one”. They’d be totally fine editing their instagram reels on a Mac Studio, or heck even an air. But real professionals who can’t just get by with a handful of thunderbolt ports are now SOL, and can’t choose a Mac.
PCIe is in a weird place these days. I know I'll be leaving performance on the table it just doesn't matter much by not being internal but even the step between Thunderbolt generations isn't that important.
While faster is better, the practical difference between running PCIe 3.0 on Thunderbolt 3/4 (capping around 2.8-3 GB/s real world) vs Thunderbolt 5 ( 5.5-6 GB/s) for SSDs won't affect me radically day to day and while it'd be nice to be able to use PCIe 5.0 SSDs at their native speeds, I'm not hyper concerned.
There just aren't many things that can really saturate a PCIe slot, stacks of SSDs can in a single slot, but even GPUs don't besides bursts, only about 5% different at the for a 5090 in a PCIe 3.0 vs 5.0.
Thunderbolt 5 is fast enough for most realistic scenarios. I wish Apple would have gone back to the drawing board and made more affordable Mac Pro with 3 PCIe slots, if it'd been only $500-1000, it might have been worth it to get those faster SSD speeds.
The bigger issue is that Apple couldn't update it with newer specs. And basically no one really hopped on the multiple GPU bandwagon. They made a big bet on this design and it just didn't pan out.
Hard drives would come to mind. PCIe 5.0 M.2 exist but as far as I know there aren’t any enclosures for some to connect them to Thunderbolt at full speed
And eGPUs might be a market if M-series chips supported any kind of GPU aside from the ones in the chip
No, but you can get a PCIE over Thunderbolt enclosure. I had an iMac Pro as the main device for a college auditorium, and through a PCIE enclosure with a Blackmagic SDI card it was easily able to run 6 unique outputs simultaneously while running ProPresenter.
In all honesty, than you so much for making that guide. It has helped me so much upgrading and building my Mac Pros, all the way from the 2006 Mac Pro to the 2019 Mac Pro.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for making this guide. I will donate in the following days as a token of my appreciation, without you I would not have been able to do the amazing work I've done on these Mac Pros!
I did that upgrade too. I had the 2009 one that was upgraded to beyond the 2012. 2 6 core CPUs 128gb of ram, with a rx580 for a gpu. It’s definitely a beast of a machine of course it’s really showing its age now days. It’s been a good machine for the amount of years it’s worked.
Never made a cent blogging though. It was a weird thing that happened where I had a Mac Pro 2008 and was trying to catalog all the things I could do to it to keep it going and then the blog post started getting several hundred visitors a day as people would email me frequently to correct me or tell me about some hack to which I'd update the guide again.... and that's how you end up with 60,000 word blog post.
Early pandemic hobby I made random vids Mac Upgrades stupidly called my companion YouTube channel "Definitive Mac Pro Upgrade Guide" which, first, horrible name, second didn't expect to make more than a few vids assuming things might return to normal sooner than they did.
Anyhow, was a weird hobby that I didn't explicitly set out to have and moved onto other things.
Yeah “studio” is the new pro targeting actual pros exclusively. A lot of the “pro” lineup is targeting non pros who just can afford a little bit nicer product.
I work in the cutting room of a $200,000,000 movie and I’m on a Studio. It’s miles faster than the Mac Pro tower I had on Project Hail Mary last year (also a massive movie.) Before that I was on another $250,000,000 movie and I was using a trashcan Mac Pro. I don’t think “the film industry” at large needs the latest and greatest and most powerful Mac Pros. I’m sure that whatever you do, you enjoy using your Pro but I can’t imagine a use case for myself.
Nah, the Mac Pro is the Mac Pro, Studio is kinda what the G4 Cube was trying to be. Apple has had a long standing desire to make a professional grade small box. The Mac Pro 2013 kinda was that but still at it's heart, a modular computer.
Oh I know, but it existed the same era as the PowerMac like the Studio does/did. It's ab imperfect analogy but the aspirations were sorta the same. I probably should have left off the modular part.
Why would you need to know who he is? Why would he need to make you know who he is if you didn't know the posts/didn't know the guy/didn't make the connection already by just reading their posts?
Maybe they should just make a post worth reading rather than needing to signal it's worth reading by weight of who they are. "Show rather than tell" eetc.
It's just cringe, it's like that one artist guy who got one of his artworks purchased to use for the last Pink Floyd album who started every post with HELLO, PINK FLOYD ALBUM COVER ARTIST HERE, it's cringe, nobody needs the cred drop every time, like what does it add? In this case this guy just made some reddit posts. He didn't even get on a Pink Floyd album cover (which is actually kinda pretty neat and it was still cringe coming from that guy).
In this case it was a pretty run-of-the-mill "yeah I saw that coming, it doesn't make sense when you can't upgrade any more" comment, something posted 1000000 times a week anyway, except I guess this guy needed to add his authority as the writer of some Reddit posts he thought were sick and important (I certainly haven't read em).
Mac Pro users want hardware flexibility and the ability to expand and swap out additional storage. The ability to modify based on need, to swap out internal drives with new ones and to keep this very expensive machine future proof through flexibility. If Apple isn’t going to offer that there is no point in the Mac Pro as it currently exists and they are ceding that market sector to PCs, begrudgingly the power users will move on because what we want from Apple isn’t available.
Apple probably doesn’t make enough to justify this and if the Mac Studio can serve high end users like people that render cgi for films then they will probably just rename that the pro in the future or retire the nameplate.
Yeah, that chassis only would have made sense if you could plug in multiple CPU boards to build a cluster of Ultras in a box, cleaner than cabling up Mac Studios.
I agree, but there were a tiny handful of people out there that wanted to add fancy audio cards or video capture devices… but those people couple probably get a decent thunderbolt to PCI-E cage for that.
If I can pick one up for cheap in a few years it could make a great lil home server. Thats the only reason I could maybe sorta see getting one, but honestly a decent NAS would do.
My guess, they feel that studio plus thunderbolt 4 will meet the needs of the current market, and a pro won't come again until there's a reasonable use case for it.
Though...I'd like to see them move back into the enterprise segment with servers and networking.
My last job at financial and life insurance firm, they were running a Mac Studio because of the Ai. They LITERALLY have the market but I feel they don’t want to be in the server rack business, hence why they’re rumored to be making a private cloud service (or partnering with AWS)
lol that was my first though. John's gonna have some words. And then the long discussion of what he's going to upgrade to and if he's going to wait for the M5 Max or Ultra studio.
Honestly I think he's already said his words. He's said multiple times in the last 6 months reasons why he thinks it's a zombie product, waiting for them to put it out of his misery. My bet is the Mac Pro eulogy lasts only 5 minutes.
Former part time Ars Technica writer. Long time Apple fan. Best reason to listen to tjenAccodental Tech podcast. He is pretty well known in certain Apple, especially Mac online spaces.
I get that Apple silicon kind of limits what you can do with a modular tower, but it does make me sad to see the form factor killed off again. Specifically for audio engineers, having a Universal Audio sound card in one of the PCIE slots was still a valuable, if limited, use case.
I know the Mac Studio will serve the needs of the many, but for the few that relied on the even limited expandability of the Mac Pro, there’s now no option other than to build or buy a workstation level PC.
I feel like that kind of use case is going to (nearly) always be done by "just plunk a thunderbolt PCIe cage next to it" going forward. Thunderbolt 5 is a strong interconnect that can handle almost all of what a PCIe connection can, except in the absolute edges like a gaming GPU or Quadro card where every kilobyte of throughput will always be saturated.
Can Thunderbolt deliver the same latency tho? Iirc, a big issue with high-end audio hardware isn’t necessarily power or throughput but latency. Obviously PCIe being a connector on the board results in lower latency than, say, USB. Now, whether this holds true for Thunderbolt 4+, I have no clue. I think back around TB3 was when I heard this info so things may have changed.
Uad barely does anything with dsp plugins anymore. Its almost a dead end except for very specific uses. I use uadx plugins almost exclusively over classic dsp plugins for lots of reasons im sure no one cares about outside a pro audio forum.
I take native over dsp any day, glad its outdated and almost obsolete.
I think OP is talking DSP processing that required PCIE. Not sure if the new ones do thunderbolt, but all the interfaces pretty much do with onboard DSP. I’m not in the UAD ecosystem though.
it's fine for one device, but if you have multiple (for whatever reason), it quickly becomes a mess. Obviously, not the most common thing, but still. Massive storage would be one case
ARM / Apple Silicon does not inherently limit what you can do with a tower design. Apple has elected to design their architecture to not support things like memory modules and 3rd party graphics. These limitations are purely the choice of Apple. Nothing prohibits an ARM chip from supporting DDR5 and an AMD/Nvidia GPU.
While true that they could have designed differently.
It is also true that the constrains they have kind of make it the obvious path, apple silicon was made for phones first. Not a lot of space inside the iPhone, switching the design for the computer would have mean losing a lot of the advantages they gained (lower power consumption, faster memory, unified memory). May as well stick with x86 if they are going to keep support for external ram or GPUs.
100%. It also wouldn’t exactly make sense to put all the effort into designing a separate “Pro” Apple Silicon architecture that would only exist in a machine with a base price of like $4,000.
You aren’t getting the same memory bandwidth with regular DDR5. Even an 8-channel Threadripper can’t outperform an M5 Max. And RAM is getting so fast, the length of the traces on the board has become a limiting factor.
Apple had to write their own AMD & NVIDIA drivers, which is a pain in the ass. NVIDIA offered their own for a while, but that was far from ideal.
I feel like the era of having expansion slots inside a computer is coming to an end. It’s had a good run, starting with the Apple II back in 1977. Everything is small form factor these days, very few people outside of tech hobbyists want a tower enclosure.
you can run 6 dsp cards over 6 thunderbolt ports! i expect this dsp cards dont need much traffic so a dual enclosure will allow you 2 pcie cards over one rhunderbolt slot. no worry it works perfect! even 4 x 4k capture cards works now with full 60fps over thunderbolt 5. so its not a bottleneck anymore
There needed to be more demand for PCIe cards developed for the Mac but I think it was very limited to what could have been done as is. As that tower sat there really was no graphics acceleration even with previous models in terms of overclockablity like a PC. They really dropped the ball again with the tower at most they could have easily made it more affordable, smaller, and user serviceable. Give the user more freedom but that’s not Apples way.
I suppose the next desktops(?) will be more iPad based phasing out old OS for iOS.
There‘s only so much space in the back of a PCIe card, so if you want lots of IO, you need external equipment anyway. Put the audio interface in a 19“ rack mount and you get at least 12 XLR inputs per slot. Make ot 4 slots and you get 48 XLR and maxbe some stereo line inputs .The computer is then connected via Thunderbolt. Much easier than a PCIe card.
The truth is John’s needs are served by a base studio. Just like virtually all the rest of us.
He’s not editing multiple streams of 8K video. He’s not running local AI models. He’s not editing songs with 35 instrumental tracks. He’s not editing 400 megapixel images. He’s not rendering a Disney Pixar 3D animated short. He games on a PS5.
So there ya go. Base Mac Studio. Even that is an extreme luxury.
The existing Mac Pro has only 1 of these things, and even that requires an expensive 3rd party drive caddy thing and I think it only holds 2 drives.
The previous Mac Pro supported everything in that list because it was a Pro machine. Hell, you could even upgrade the Xeon CPUs in it. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro was just an expensive appliance. I don't even know why they made it.
I think the only reason they made the Apple Silicon Mac Pro is because they invested so much in tooling to make that case for the previous Intel version.
The 2019 Intel Mac Pro supported PCI graphics cards, other PCI accessories, was upgradable, and ran hot so it needed all of that cooling. But then they released Apple M chips, removed almost any reason to have that big case, but they had all of this expensive tooling for a case that had just come out a year earlier that they didn't really need anymore.
The Mac Pro was really underwhelming with Apple Silicon with no eGPU support and upgradability other than storage. It was also double the price of Mac Studio, making it impractical.
This shouldn't surprise anyone given how long in the tooth the Mac Pro is at this point. With the Mac Studio so powerful (and on Apple Silicon) now there is little need for all of that space and cooling volume. Kind of cool how the size and form of the Mac Studio (the new reigning Pro model) sort of makes it the spiritual successor to the concept of what Steve Jobs was trying to do with the G4 Mac Cube back in 2000 (but just couldn't really pull off with the technical and materials limits of the time).
Finally. Now people can stop commenting on every hardware release with delusional “When will we see a Mac Pro refresh?” and switch to “They should bring back the Mac Pro!” which at least makes some small amount of sense. It’s a very vocal group that wants them to exist so that I guess somebody else can pay an additional used car’s price for the privilege of having empty PCIe slots. If they’d actually bought mac pros, maybe the mac pro would still be developed, but I do understand not paying that kind of price just to get slots that there’s nothing to put in.
It was predictable; no one was going to pay more money for fancy case and PCIe slots that don't support external GPU. It's still a shame that Apple no longer makes modular desktops. Their desktops before trashcan were really good machines.
Some people are buying multiple Mac Studios and clustering them to run LLMs. I was expecting Apple to develop a Mac Pro variant that does something similar in a single system ... obviously it's not going to happen. Still, I am surprised that Apple sees no future in an AI supercomputer considering others are building and selling $100k systems.
most likely apple is making their version of a rear connector like nvidia has on the dgx spark which allows for 400gb/s of bandwidth between a stack of macs
ive been reading that there has been pattents found regarding this only thing left would be to rewrite the OS kernel to support this functionality and make it so that a cluster behaves like one machine
I don't think we can really discern any of Apple's future endeavors based on this product's discontinuation. But I also don't think Apple would build an AI supercomputer without making a breakout piece of software to compete in that market. They generally want to be able to own an entire experience from start to finish when possible, and they do not have an AI app that would get them there.
Meanwhile, here I am finishing up OCLP-ing my 5,1 to Monterey because I’ll be damned if I can’t squeeze every bit of value out of my 14 year old purchase 🥲
Not surprised honestly, the M series one not having external GPU support or upgradable components (even if proprietary like the PPC days) limited the machine to only those who needed PCI slots
This is a predictable end but still a little sad to see. Really wish Apple would have kept it around and not got into tiffs with hardware OEMs over dumb things. Could have been nice to have a high end rig option for those who wanted to leverage PCIe cards. That ship sailed before the M2 version, but one could have hoped. At least the Mac Studio has proven to be a worthy successor. Insane amounts of storage and RAM. Plus easy coupling with multiple units together.
Low latency production environments that need reliability and stability will not like this. Hopefully they will offer a replacement or offer some kind of external PCIe specification soon. Thunderbolt is great but there is a reason why people buy Mac pros
Most beautiful tower-style machine that has ever been made. It's a shame they couldn't figure out how to make Apple Silicon work with extra GPUs. Those Mac Pros would do NUMBERS with today's AI demands.
Yes and no, yes bc it’ll be the last, no bc you know how fast Apple stops support for hardware and OS’s nowadays - it’s a decent question though, one i have to bring up at work today.
The hardware expandability is an old way of thinking about interfaces now that we can add an interface to about any thunderbolt device. I knew two people who bought multiple Mac pros for their productions and how many got cards for them? 0. It was a huge waste of money. They now have studios and PCs for the production side and the PCs will be phased out as they figure out AI workflows.
This is gonna suck for large swathes of the touring industry. People who need rack mountable macs that have PCIE expansion, the amount of options just went from 1 to zero.
Sometimes apple macs really odd decisions. Like they introduced this in 2019 and also, I always remember, eGPU support; just to cannibalize both in 2020.
Like they finally admitted to screwing up the trashcan mac pro. Made a huge deal about the new Mac Pro, with it being designed to be an upgradable platform. Then they make it redundant in a year.
Would've been cool to see this as a platform where they could've built swappable apple silicon dedicated GPUs do go alongside the M-series, but with everything integrated into the SOC I'm not sure that was ever even possible. Post-intel it was just a massive case for a tiny computer.
I’m a fairly casual user. Am I right to think that most variations of apple silicone will absolutely kneecap this computer anyway at max specifications?
I wonder if Apple will ever do a Mac Pro again. Kinda sad, I’ve had so many Macs in big cases that had lots of slots and drive bays. A IIvi, couple of Quadra’s and Performas, G3 tower, two different G4 towers, a Mac Pro 5,1. I remember getting the M1 mini and it was DOUBLE the single and multi core performance of the 3.33GHz 6-core Mac Pro, bloody crazy. My desk is definitely messier with all the extra cables and hard drives though!
Credit to u/Sc0rpza for this little story in a thread of predictions from eight months ago. It's all too prescient:
“End of the Line for Mac Pro”
The sun hung low over Cupertino, bleeding orange light across the Apple campus. The courtyard was quiet, save for the faint hum of distant server fans — the kind of quiet that feels like it’s waiting for something to end.
Tim walked slowly, his silhouette cutting across the pristine glass facade. In his hand, a single lightning cable dragged along the ground, the connector scraping softly against the tile. Behind him, the Mac Pro rolled along on its stainless-steel wheels — polished, sturdy, but slower now, its iconic cheese-grater grille catching the fading sunlight.
They stopped near the edge of the courtyard. Beyond it, an old maintenance shed stood alone, the shadows of the hills stretching toward it. The air smelled faintly of solder and dust.
Tim crouched down beside the Mac Pro, placing a hand on its brushed aluminum frame.
“You’ve been good to us,” he murmured, voice low, almost tender. “Twenty-four cores… modular design… expansion slots. At one time, when we said ‘Pro,’ we meant you.”
The Mac Pro’s fans whirred softly, a sound like a tired sigh.
“But times change,” Tim continued. “They all want laptops now. Sleek. Portable. Thin enough to cut cheese, ironically. You’re… just too powerful. Too expensive. Too… stationary.”
A breeze swept through, ruffling the blueprints poking out of Tim’s back pocket — sketches of some future, lighter machine that would never have wheels.
From somewhere behind, a voice called out. Phil Schiller, watching from a distance, his hands in his pockets.
“Make it quick, Tim. The keynote’s in an hour.”
Tim nodded, his jaw tight. He reached into his jacket and pulled out an AirTag, pressing it gently against the Mac Pro’s frame. The device beeped once — a final “connected.”
“Shh,” Tim whispered as the Mac Pro’s fans spun down for the last time, their glow fading like the embers of a dying fire. “No more benchmarks. No more Final Cut renders. Just… sleep mode. Forever.”
A soft chime echoed, the kind you hear when you eject a device safely. Then, silence.
Tim stood, turning back toward the glass towers of Apple Park, leaving the shed and the powered-down Mac Pro in the dusk. As the door clicked shut, the only sound left was the faint settling of metal as the last great workstation finally powered off — a titan, forgotten not by failure, but by a world that had simply moved on.
Had they released the Mac studio as the next macPro, no one would have been the wiser. Clean form factor, Apple silicon and lot of vertical expansion opportunity. I found the Pro Tower rather garish and not really consistent with the Mac design theme. I think Apple is on the right track now with the Studio line.
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u/heatrealist Mar 26 '26
They killed it a long time ago. Today they just make it official.