Report Claims That Apple Has Yet Again Put the Mac Pro 'On the Back Burner' (arstechnica.com)
(Tuesday November 18, 2025 @05:20PM (BeauHD)
from the don't-get-your-hopes-up dept.)
- Reference: 0180130373
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/11/18/2220205/report-claims-that-apple-has-yet-again-put-the-mac-pro-on-the-back-burner
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/report-claims-that-apple-has-yet-again-put-the-mac-pro-on-the-back-burner/
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
> Apple's Power Mac and Mac Pro towers used to be the company's primary workstations, but it has been years since they were updated with the same regularity as the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The Mac Pro has seen just four hardware updates in the last 15 years, and that's counting a 2012 refresh that was mostly identical to the 2010 version. Long-suffering Mac Pro buyers may have taken heart when Apple finally added an M2 Ultra processor to the tower in mid-2023, making it one of the very last Macs to switch from Intel to Apple Silicon -- surely this would mean that the computer would at least be updated once every year or two, like the Mac Studio has been? But Bloomberg's Mark Gurman [1]says that Mac Pro buyers shouldn't get their hopes up for new hardware in 2026.
>
> Gurman says that the tower is " [2]on the back burner" at Apple and that the company is "focused on a new Mac Studio" for the next-generation M5 Ultra chip that is in the works. As we reported earlier this year, Apple doesn't have plans to design or release an M4 Ultra, and the Mac Studio refresh from this spring included an M3 Ultra alongside the M4 Max. Note that Gurman carefully stops short of saying we definitely won't see a Mac Pro update next year -- the emphasis on the Mac Studio merely "suggests the Mac Pro won't be updated in 2026 in a significant way," and internal sources tell him "Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro." The current Mac Pro does still use the M2 Ultra rather than the M3 Ultra, which indicates that Apple doesn't see the need to update its high-end desktop every time it releases a suitable chip. But all of Apple's other desktops -- the iMac, the Mac mini, and the Studio -- have skipped a silicon generation once since the M1 came out in 2020.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-11-16/apple-s-iphone-road-map-iphone-air-2-iphone-18-mac-pro-future-tesla-carplay-mi1q4l2o
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/report-claims-that-apple-has-yet-again-put-the-mac-pro-on-the-back-burner/
> Apple's Power Mac and Mac Pro towers used to be the company's primary workstations, but it has been years since they were updated with the same regularity as the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The Mac Pro has seen just four hardware updates in the last 15 years, and that's counting a 2012 refresh that was mostly identical to the 2010 version. Long-suffering Mac Pro buyers may have taken heart when Apple finally added an M2 Ultra processor to the tower in mid-2023, making it one of the very last Macs to switch from Intel to Apple Silicon -- surely this would mean that the computer would at least be updated once every year or two, like the Mac Studio has been? But Bloomberg's Mark Gurman [1]says that Mac Pro buyers shouldn't get their hopes up for new hardware in 2026.
>
> Gurman says that the tower is " [2]on the back burner" at Apple and that the company is "focused on a new Mac Studio" for the next-generation M5 Ultra chip that is in the works. As we reported earlier this year, Apple doesn't have plans to design or release an M4 Ultra, and the Mac Studio refresh from this spring included an M3 Ultra alongside the M4 Max. Note that Gurman carefully stops short of saying we definitely won't see a Mac Pro update next year -- the emphasis on the Mac Studio merely "suggests the Mac Pro won't be updated in 2026 in a significant way," and internal sources tell him "Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro." The current Mac Pro does still use the M2 Ultra rather than the M3 Ultra, which indicates that Apple doesn't see the need to update its high-end desktop every time it releases a suitable chip. But all of Apple's other desktops -- the iMac, the Mac mini, and the Studio -- have skipped a silicon generation once since the M1 came out in 2020.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-11-16/apple-s-iphone-road-map-iphone-air-2-iphone-18-mac-pro-future-tesla-carplay-mi1q4l2o
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/report-claims-that-apple-has-yet-again-put-the-mac-pro-on-the-back-burner/
The Mac Pro is about the slots (Score:3)
by TheMiddleRoad ( 1153113 )
And there isn't much of a market for Macs with slots. Thunderbolt 5 takes care of a lot of IO, and if you need more, you're probably not going to use a Mac. Adding wide PCIE 5.0 to the Ultra 5 is going to take some work that is probably better spent on just getting it out the door without the I/O wasting space for 95% of users.
Why make a tower (Score:1)
I have a Mac Studio. I also have a Mac pro from the last Intel era that is full of memory, cores, SSDs and is basically a brick now.
There's no reason for a computer to take up more space than a Mac Studio.