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Is the 2023 Mac Pro dead on arrival? [Opinion]

The Mac Pro has effectively been defined as two things. First, the most powerful Mac in Apple’s line-up. Second, the most expandable machine, but it’s looking increasingly like neither will apply to the 2023 Mac Pro.

And if you take away both of the unique selling points of the Mac Pro, isn’t it dead on arrival … ?

Background

Launched in 2006 (or 2005, if you count the Developer Transition Kit), the Mac Pro was intended to be the ultimate Mac.

You could spec it up at the point of purchase to be a more powerful machine than anything else in the line-up. You could also tailor it to your particular needs. Your priority might be CPU power, graphics performance, RAM, or storage; whatever your own usage required, you could configure the machine to suit.

Equally, as technology moved on, or your needs grew, you could continue to adapt the machine – upgrading CPU or GPU, adding RAM, increasing storage.

But lately, there have been reports suggesting that both initial power and expandability might be compromised.

Compromised power

Mark Gurman last month suggested that Apple had cancelled plans to make the Mac Pro more powerful than any other machine in the line-up, by abandoning work on an M2 Extreme chip.

Apple has apparently scrapped plans to make a new Apple Silicon Mac Pro with a high-end “M2 Extreme” chip featuring 48 CPU cores and 152 GPU cores. 

The “Extreme” chip would have essentially been a dual M2 Ultra. But complexity and cost concerns seem to have shelved those plans. 

Instead, he said, the machine would launch with just the M2 Ultra – the same chip expected to be available for this year’s Mac Studio. So suddenly the Mac Pro would no longer be the most powerful Mac in the line-up, just one of two high-end desktop Macs.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that performance of the Mac Pro and top-end Mac Studio would be identical. The bigger chassis and vents of the Mac Pro form factor should allow more effective cooling, thus allowing the machine to run flat out for longer periods before thermal throttling kicks in.

All the same, though, it’s a far cry from a more powerful chip.

Compromised expandability

Earlier this month, Gurman suggested that the expandability of the 2023 Mac Pro may also be compromised, with no upgradable memory.

The product will not support expandable RAM, as the Apple Silicon architecture means all memory is tied to the M2 chip.

And today he says the same may be true of the GPUs.

The next Mac Pro may lack user upgradeable GPUs in addition to non-upgradeable RAM. Right now Apple Silicon Macs don’t support external GPUs and you have to use whatever configuration you buy on Apple’s website.

So what’s left, in terms of expansion potential? Well, storage.

That will leave storage as the main user-upgradeable component in the new Mac Pro, which will have the same design as the current, Intel model.

Which may be faster than external storage options, but at this point, that seems far from certain. Given the high-speed, high-capacity external SSDs on the market, it’s not looking like a great point of differentiation.

So what’s the point of a 2023 Mac Pro?

If the machine won’t be more powerful than anything else in the line-up, and it (mostly) won’t be upgradable after purchase, the question has to be asked: What’s the point of it?

Where the Mac Pro is concerned, Apple has backed itself into a corner with its Apple Silicon design. A large part of why M-series chips are so much better than Intel ones is because of the system-on-a-chip (SoC) design. In particular, unified memory. Here’s what Apple had to say about it when it first unveiled the M1 chip.

As a system on a chip (SoC), M1 combines numerous powerful technologies into a single chip, and features a unified memory architecture for dramatically improved performance and efficiency […]

Macs and PCs have traditionally used multiple chips for the CPU, I/O, security and more. Now with M1, these technologies are combined into a single SoC, delivering a whole new level of integration for greater performance and power efficiency. M1 also features a unified memory architecture that brings together high-bandwidth, low-latency memory into a single pool within a custom package. This allows all the technologies in the SoC to access the same data without copying it between multiple pools of memory, further improving performance and efficiency.

Top comment by Chris Winger

Liked by 6 people

As an owner of a Mac Pro, expandable storage and high ram are 2 of the 3 primary reasons I use it.

Storage & PCIE Slots

When you talk about storage, it's HDD expansion as well as SSD. I have 24 TB's of HD and 12 TB's of SSD. SSD for current projects, HD for short term archives. This would be one of the biggest selling points to it. Not using external configurations.

I also use PCIE slots that would have caused me to get an external option for the Studio.

Higher Ram

They could limit the Mac Studio to 128 RAM and 8 TB storage. This would mean to get higher RAM and more storage, the MacPro is required. It's both reasons I used a Mac Studio for 3 months, then switched back to a Mac Pro. Some of my 3D and AfterEffects projects really push the RAM in the Studio.

Expandable Graphics

If they do come out and surprise everyone with expandable graphic cards, it would be a no brainer. While the rumor is they will not be used, it could be an option still.

View all comments

Which is wonderful – except when you want to make a machine upgradable. If everything is on one chip, you can’t upgrade the individual elements: CPU, GPU, memory.

I’d hate to see the Mac Pro disappear, but … isn’t Apple effectively making it pointless? It appears the best we can now hope for is a machine which will offer better sustained performance than the Mac Studio, thanks to better cooling, and more convenient (and possibly faster) expandable storage.

Is that enough to justify the existence of a 2023 Mac Pro? I’m honestly not sure that it is.

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Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Ben Lovejoy

Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!


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