Eshu Marneedi

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac late March:

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

I’ve held off on writing about the Mac Pro for a week because, well, I was busy, but also to hear the thoughts of the Mac Pro’s enjoyers. I have owned many Macs in my lifetime, but the Mac Pro was never one of them. From 2006 to 2013, I was too young to use a computer of the Mac Pro’s caliber, and by the time I had become a programmer, the 2013 “Trash Can” Mac Pro was out and heavily criticized. And then the 2019 Mac Pro, perhaps the best iteration of the machine, was released only to be killed less than a year later by the announcement of the transition to Apple silicon. The Mac Pro really only had eight years to thrive: seven in the late aughts and early 2010s, and one in 2020.

For those years, the Mac Pro was truly a phenomenal computer. It succeeded the PowerPC-based Power Mac G5, which at the time of the Intel transition only received minor processor upgrades, and complemented the rest of the Mac lineup well. It fit perfectly in Steve Jobs’ famous grid of Macs:

When it was finally updated in 2019, it was a gorgeous, powerful computer that brought enthusiasm back to the Mac again. And the Mac really needed it during the period from 2016 to 2020, when Apple largely neglected the Mac. The MacBook Pro thermal throttled and had no usable ports, the Touch Bar was glitchy and suffered from poor developer adoption, the butterfly keyboard and display flex cable would break so often that Apple set up repair programs for both of them, the iMac Pro went without an update, there was no proper standalone desktop Mac, and Apple shifted its software focus to iPadOS. SwiftUI segmented itself as the future of development on macOS because nobody was writing AppKit apps anymore, and for those who were too hesitant to even embrace that, there was Mac Catalyst. It was truly a horrible time for the Mac, and the Mac Pro brought life back to the product line. The collective cheers at 2019’s Worldwide Developers Conference — where the 2019 Mac Pro was announced — were from a crowd that figuratively and literally wept at the state of the Mac.

But what really brought the Mac back from endangered-species status was not the Mac Pro, a luxury computer that cost more than an average American’s monthly salary. It was the transition to Apple silicon. While Apple fixed its Intel Macs — the Mac Pro, the MacBook Pro, and the MacBook Air — in late 2019 and early 2020, it was hard at work on the next generation of Macs that would truly revitalize the software and hardware ecosystem. But I don’t think Apple fully anticipated how much of an effect the transition to Apple silicon would have on the Mac. The M1 was, for Apple, the worst Mac processor it would ever make, but for everyone else, it opened up a new paradigm for the Mac. Mac laptops were, for the first time in four years, worth buying again. People ripped out their iMacs for M1 Mac minis. They were astoundingly efficient, had leading single-core performance that even beat some Mac Pro configurations, and most importantly, made macOS 11 Big Sur feel snappy and iOS-like — something the platform hadn’t experienced for years.

But this is not a post about Apple silicon — it’s about the Mac Pro. The M1 proved that Apple’s new strategy would be hardware and software cohesion. They taught us that the new Macs would focus on snappiness and efficiency first, and raw power second. Silently, this was the end of the Mac Pro. The M1 edited video just as snappily as the Mac Pro, while costing five times less. It wasn’t as fast at transcoding and exporting video, but Final Cut Pro’s background rendering feature, optimized for Apple silicon in ways it never could have been on Intel Macs, made video editing such a pleasure on the M1 series of computers. Again, I don’t think Apple could have conceived this. Just transitioning to Apple silicon obviated the need for everything the Mac Pro represented. It had massive blower fans, expandable PCIe slots for graphics cards, and a design that was reminiscent of a gaming PC. It even sounded like one. None of this was necessary for the Mac to be performant again in the Apple silicon era.

In fact, the Mac Pro’s expandability would only hurt. Part of what made Apple silicon so special was that all of the core components of the computers were packaged together in a system-on-a-chip. Memory took a “unified” architecture where the central processing unit and graphics card could use the same pool of memory. The neural engine and secure enclave were built into the processor. The CPU and graphics card were packaged together. This cohesion begat significant performance and efficiency gains and was structural to Apple silicon processors. This is how the iPhone was built, and Apple couldn’t change this for the Mac. So it didn’t. The Mac Studio, announced in 2022, embraced this natural cohesion by simply expanding the size of the Mac mini — which was already updated for the M1 — to add a larger heat sink and power supply to power the new M1 Ultra and M1 Max processors.

The Mac Studio was not intended to be the successor to the Mac Pro, but in hindsight, it really was the only feasible option. Apple couldn’t add external graphics card support because, again, it would be impossible with the Apple silicon SoC design. Similarly, it couldn’t add expandable memory slots because the unified memory architecture was integral to the processors. It didn’t need the massive enclosure anymore to house all of this expandability, and neither would Apple silicon require the massive cooling apparatus and power supply the Intel Mac Pro did. The Mac Studio had the power of the Mac Pro, but it was built for Apple silicon. I’m not sure what exactly made John Ternus, Apple’s hardware chief, tell the audience that the Mac Pro was “for another day” during the March 2022 introduction of the Mac Studio, but clearly Apple (incorrectly) thought that there was a place for the Mac Pro somewhere.

When the 2023 Mac Pro was finally announced, fully transitioned to Apple silicon, it effectively spelled the end for the product line for the exact reasons I described earlier: expandability in the Apple silicon era was nigh impossible. The Mac Studio was the ideal Mac Pro. Apple, for some reason, didn’t see this until three years later, but the writing was already on the wall. Everything people loved about Apple silicon directly clashed with the design philosophy of the Mac Pro. Apple silicon brought the iPhone architecture to the Mac, while the Mac Pro was still stuck in a bygone era where the iPhone and the Mac were fundamentally different platforms. Nobody bought the 2023 Mac Pro, and dwindling sales discouraged Apple from refreshing it with a new processor. And in March, it finally bookended the product.

There’s no real lesson to be learned here; this isn’t much of a tragedy. I feel bad for saying that — “nothing of value was lost” is inappropriate for this moment — but the truth is that the Mac Pro never had a place in the Apple silicon era. If Apple had realized that midway through producing the Mac Studio, it probably wouldn’t have even called it that at all — the Mac Pro name would have lived to see another day. Ultimately, I think the instinct of making the Mac mini larger as opposed to making the Mac Pro smaller was the right call, but after that was done, Apple should have realized that it unwittingly negated the Mac Pro. That isn’t a bad thing — it’s a natural consequence of the transition to Apple silicon. The Mac Studio is a fantastic computer worthy of the Mac Pro’s loyal fandom. I myself owned the first generation before I switched to using just a single MacBook Pro. But perhaps Apple should’ve held onto the name “Mac Pro” — I feel it died too soon. That’s the real tragedy.