Apple may as well not release an Apple Silicon Mac Pro if they don’t have slots and eGPU support.
I certainly hope that they haven’t gotten that stupid at Apple to repeat the mistake of the “trash can” Mac Pro.
I’m not sure how much I want to trust Gurman, but I will say this. If what he says is right, this would be worse than the trash can (2013) Mac Pro.
The 2013 Mac Pro had user upgradable RAM, flash, and in principle allowed GPU upgrades. That it never got any GPU upgrades is because Apple screwed the pooch and neglected the entire system once they had it out the door. But in principle it had the PCIe bus and the cards could be swapped (the CPU too). And of course it had DIMM slots.
I cannot believe Apple will make the same mistake especially since they already have relaunched the 2013 Mac Pro as the much improved Mac Studio. This is in fact one of the main reasons I don’t trust Gurman. They just can’t be this dumb on what is likely to be a ~$5-6k system.
We’re going to find out.
I had been presuming that any future Mac Pro would involve
- multiple M3 chips in some form of parallel operation. I think there’s likely a limit to how often you can multiply these chips into ever larger more complex beasts. My bet is on multiple M3 chips.
- Upgradeable graphics will likely have to be custom, my bet is via some versions along the lines of the old Afterburner module, ie with set benefits directly addressed much as the Afterburner did ProRes encoding. This possibly could be an external box, which also might appeal to Studio owners. I can’t see outside suppliers involved at all.
The longer this goes on, the more I’m apt to believe that Apple isn’t going to release a “traditional” Mac Pro. Unless they’ve got something in store that nobody has even thought of, I just don’t see how they can release a mostly un-upgradeable Mac and call it the Mac Pro.
Yet, I also can’t believe Apple would just throw their hands up and give up on it.
Either way, I would guess any Mac Pro announcement we may have hoped for isn’t going to come any time soon.
1 Like
So maybe the heading of this thread is bad and it should instead have been “Perhaps there will never be a new Mac Studio”. 
Gurman now claims that since the Mac Pro will be so similar to the Mac Studio, Apple plans to simply not upgrade the Studio. At least until the M3 or M4, possibly never.
I guess that’s another way to create differentiation if there’s no M2 Extreme. 
The Studio is less than a year old – I have really massive doubts that they would cancel it this quickly, especially given the excellent reviews it has gotten. Tim Cook’s manufacturing-focused soul would quail at all the tooling thrown away.
2 Likes
I agree, I doubt they would cancel it outright. But I could absolutely see them just letting the Studio languish. Apple has displayed this annoying tendency to neglect pro Macs on several occasions. This would be far form a first. But at this point my lack of faith in Gurman is what keeps me overall still quite optimistic when it comes to the new Mac Pro (and fate of the Studio).
1 Like
I also doubt Apple will let the Studio languish. My guess is that it is targeted to professionals want a Mac they can move around with that is not a MacBook Pro. The Studio has a lot more power, especially when ginned up, to quickly run Final Cut Pro, as well as Premier Pro and other Adobe Creative Cloud stuff, Avid and Media Composer, DaVinci, AutoDesk, etc., etc, etc. And the studio can easily move around an office or home. Architects, animators, high end 3D, photographers and graphic designers, packaging pros, news and other TV broadcasters, etc., movie professionals etc.
In short, probably all the creative and media people who kept Apple alive during the bad old days.
Well that very same crowd got screwed over by Apple in 2013 and again in 2019. So while I agree Apple shouldn’t do it, history shows they are indeed quite capable of doing it, regardless of how important we think that crowd should be.
Except for the Cube, I don’t remember “that crowd” ever being screwed over by Apple once Steve Jobs returned, or during Tim Cook’s reign. A big difference now is that the Studio is very customizable, and buyers can choose chips. And it’s got an add on in what looks to be a super impressive screen.
My guess is that a significant % of Studio and Screen target market are professionals that need power, performance and speed; pros that have been salivating over the Mac Pro but cannot justify the expense. The Studio ain’t cheap, but it’s not near the cost of a Mac Pro.
From the Six Colors 2022 Apple Report Card:
Dan Moren wrote: “The Mac Studio makes me wonder whether Apple really needs a Mac Pro in its lineup.
My thoughts exactly. Either M2/M3 Ultra has some really big surprise for us or the Mac Studio Ultra is where it’s at. Now if only Apple would fix the Studio Display.
I don’t think that’s a crazy idea. Clearly (again, unless Apple has something up their sleeve that nobody knows about) they can’t make an AS Mac Pro that actually caters to the type of pro users who can justify the cost. Heck, even when they were being regularly updated, they weren’t flying off the shelves because really high-end pros still couldn’t use them the way they wanted due to a lack of NVidia support, etc.
The Studio is so damn powerful as it is that they could just keep upgrading the chip as they are available. Plus, they could always just keep making the Studio taller to accommodate an extra cooling mechanism needed.
1 Like
Macworld’s Jason Snell has “a bad feeling” about the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. Looks like he’s been reading this thread.
So here’s Gurman’s latest claim that Apple will begin accepting trade-ins for the M1 Mac Studio after WWDC. Between the lines it’s being suggested this means a new M2 Mac Studio is being launched at WWDC.
Meanwhile there have been ZERO rumors about the long overdue Apple Silicon Mac Pro being finally released at WWDC. Perhaps that’s because as a niche product it’s much easier kept under wraps (their VR ski goggles would be the counter argument). But perhaps, also, it’s just because Apple has indeed lost interest (cough, ski goggles, cough). Wouldn’t be the first time. In a couple days we’ll know.
Haha, Gurman keeps changing his mind. Before he said there would be no new M2 Mac Studio at WWDC because it would cannibalize the new Mac Pro. Now he’s saying there will be a new M2 Mac Studio at WWDC. Of course he stops short of saying that means no new M2 or M3 Mac Pro.
And this is why TidBITS doesn’t cover rumors.
1 Like
The interesting question is if indeed we see no new AS Mac Pro at WWDC and Apple doesn’t even address missing its self-imposed deadline for it, does that mean there will actually not be a Mac Pro?
And if not, what could the hold-up be? Would M3 allow for external/expandable memory and that’s what the MP is waiting on to finally launch?
I would not discount that the impact to the global supply chains could be causing Apple to miss their self-imposed deadline.
It is not out of the realm of possibility that the needs of the users of the Mac Pro created system architectural issues that may take Apple longer to address. All of the M-series Macs have been SoC implementations only and have not had to deal with off-chip memory, user-accessible PCI slots, external GPUs etc. (Of course I’ve made an assumption these are what Apple sees as minimum viable product features for an m-series Mac Pro).
That’s of course entirely correct. But I would also assume that the needs of an AS Mac Pro were known to Apple long ago and that they already had that well fed in to their Apple Silicon design pipeline many months (if not years) before the pandemic. In that sense it’s entirely possible they were, when their initial planning set out, just too optimistic regarding what we nowadays like to vaguely refer to as “supply chain issues”. That said, their promise to transition the entire Mac platform to AS within 2 years was made publicly and after, not before, the pandemic. In fact, it was made right at the time when a quarter of the US workforce had just been laid off and if anything, outlook was as black as it ever was during the entire pandemic. I’d love to one day learn what Apple’s internal planning looked like vs. that timeline.