Apple Discontinues Mac Pro (9to5mac.com)
- Reference: 0181109744
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/03/26/224256/apple-discontinues-mac-pro
- Source link: https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/26/apple-discontinues-the-mac-pro/
> The Mac Pro has lived many lives over the years. Apple released the current Mac Pro industrial design [2]in 2019 alongside the [3]Pro Display XDR (which was also discontinued earlier this month). That version of the Mac Pro was powered by Intel, and Apple refreshed it with the M2 Ultra chip in June 2023. It has gone without an update since then, languishing at its $6,999 price point even as Apple debuted the M3 Ultra chip in the Mac Studio last year.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/26/apple-discontinues-the-mac-pro/
[2] https://apple.slashdot.org/story/19/12/11/1356226/apples-new-mac-pro-can-cost-52000-thats-without-the-400-wheels
[3] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/06/03/2228246/apple-unveils-6k-pro-display-xdr-monitor-that-starts-at-5000
the last mac pro had an big upchange for very litt (Score:2)
the last mac pro had an big up-change for very little over the studio.
While not the best studio + TB pci-e boxes costs way less. The pro had X16 slots but the cpu really did not have pci-e lanes to fully feed them.
The m5 studio needs some kind of of EXT pci-e port (more then just TB)
Re: (Score:2)
You're probably not going to get any external PCIe port other than thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is fast enough for most Mac use cases anyway. TB5 gets you 80 Gbps bidirectional, or 120/40 Gbps asymmetrical, and there aren't a lot of things in a desktop environment that would really benefit from more than 120 Gbps.
I wonder if they'll ever re-release it? (Score:2)
It's been through several major design changes, maybe it'll get re-released with a more "classic" design sometime down the road?
Mac Studio is a redesigned Mac Pro (Score:1)
> It's been through several major design changes, maybe it'll get re-released with a more "classic" design sometime down the road?
I think the Studio is such a redesigned Pro.
Re: (Score:2)
The Studio is a sealed box, I don't see how it's remotely like the pro. Anything from additional drives to graphics cards have to be plugged into its external TB slots.
will apple lock down 3rd storage card flash swaps (Score:2)
will apple lock down 3rd party storage card flash swaps in the next studio?
Re: (Score:2)
I would hope not. Apple will apple I guess, but they are probably well aware that extensibility is a marketing plus not a negative , particularly with tech crowd, I'd argue in recent times a lot of the lock down has had more to do with manufacturing and performance efficiencies and that it has actually harmed them commercially, and they know it, but the commercial harm is outweighed by the manufacturing savings as well as the general speediness of on-chip memory. That said I *think* the latest mac minis can
The Mac Pro died in 2019 (Score:3)
Apple's Mac Pro, and before that the Power Mac, used to be a reasonably affordable machine for the capabilities it offered. The trash can was silly, but still affordable.
The 2019 return to tower form also came with an insane price increase. The base price was double that of previous generations. That killed the Mac Pro.
It's about time they finally had the funeral.
Re: (Score:2)
Apple has never offered a product that justified a large chassis. It used to be lots of slots, hard drives and other storage that justified it. Macs have never been about that, and those days are long gone.
"...used to be a reasonably affordable machine for the capabilities it offered."
No, for the reasons above. Macs never offered these capabilities before and doesn't now. Apple's vision has always been a "Studio", a "trash can", the big desk side chassis with 4 hard drive bays never made sense.
Re: The Mac Pro died in 2019 (Score:3)
Going to have to agree to disagree. I still have a MacPro5,1 from 2012 that I regularly use. All four drive trays are in use, both optical drive bays, and I have two PCI addon cards for added functionality. The expansion capabilities of the MacPro5,1 were absolutely useful and justified.
Re: (Score:2)
I had one of those back in the day where I had dropped in a firmware flashed Nvidia GPU, with a small secondary power supply stashed in the second optical bay.
That thing destroyed almost any other similarly priced workstation for years.
Re: (Score:2)
I just added the fifth hard drive to my 2010 Mac Pro. Besides the video card it also have a USB 3 card and an NVME to PCI card. It works fine, I even got Fedora to talk to the old Broadcom WiFi card.
the 2019 had bad base pricing / hardware choices (Score:2)
the 2019 had bad base pricing / hardware choices
I know the trash can had a lot of different models (Score:2)
But I seem to remember them all being pretty crazy expensive for what you got. I guess it would be probably quieter than the equivalent Windows PC or hackintosh but most of the models I see out in the wild are the really expensive ones that would have sold for $5,000 and up
Nobody (Score:2)
Is buying a $16,000 desktop computer. SGI, Sun and oh, NeXT discovered this 20 years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
You could just option the memory now and exceed that.
Re: (Score:2)
So what?
Yes, you can configure a ridiculous thing that nobody will buy from other manufacturers. And guess what? Those guys don't sell those ridiculous configurations either. But for them it's just options on top of the base config that everyone does buy.
For Apple it's an entire product line.
Re: (Score:3)
*Looks over nervously at 2 max configuration Mac Studios*
The market for expansion cards has definitely slipped.
(And this doesn't compare to running the full model on the NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 machine, but it is what it is.)
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, outside of GPUs there really isn't much need for third party cards, and arguably even GPUs aren't a show stopper with third party GPU cages. But really for 99% of the use cases the Apple silicon GPUs are good enough. Nobody sane is buying a mac pro to run games, and for AI thats a whole different complicated set of reasonings (for training you'll always be better off with a datacenter server and abank $15K datacenter GPUs.). For everything else, the Apple silicon GPU seems to punch above its we
I need to run out and buy all the remaining ones.. (Score:3)
Just in case I run out of doorstops in the future!
Can we get an XServe instead? (Score:3)
Since the Mac Pro is gone, can we get an XServe instead? There are still a number of business cases where Macs that are easy to rackmount without needing special third party stuff are important. Of course, one can toss a number of Mac Minis onto a shelf, but that isn't really enterprise tier.
XServes were one of the best 1U servers made. Ironically for a time, Apple was #1 in the storage front because companies used those combined with rebranded Promise arrays, until Apple decided to not bother with the enterprise.
Re: (Score:1)
I had the pleasure of running a G5 XServe and matching XServe RAID in the aughts. Great machines.
My 2009 Mac Pro lumbers on (Score:2)
The video card has been upgraded. The USB ports have been upgraded. The optical drive was upgraded. The drives have been upgraded repeatedly. The RAM has been upgraded. The ROM was flashed to a (slightly) newer version. It's running 24/7/365 in an unheated garage and I figure I'll keep it in its current role until it finally dies, at which point it will probably be replaceable by a $50 Raspberry Pi.
Re: (Score:2)
You'll probably save $50 per year or more in electricity costs by switching to a Pi.
Re: (Score:1)
More like $50 per month , at least.
All this parmigiano reggiano (Score:4, Funny)
What am I supposed to use to grate cheese to put on my first posts in the future?
Re: (Score:2)
> What am I supposed to use to grate cheese to put on my first posts in the future?
Well, I've got good news and bad news:
The good news is that [1]it's only a buck twenty-five. [dollartree.com]
The bad news is that, unfortunately, it does not include an Apple sticker to place on the back of your car.
[1] https://www.dollartree.com/cooking-concepts-soft-touch-cheese-grater-1-ct/356041