With Apple having announced a new Mac Studio with the exact same chipset, it seemed clear that the 2023 Mac Pro market would be pretty small – if not dead on arrival.
Talking to pro Mac users with demanding needs, it seems that the 16-inch MacBook Pro has also cannibalized much of its market…
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Mac Pro market
The market for Apple’s most powerful Mac has always been a small one. Indeed, it’s doubtful that the machine even made much commercial sense, when dividing the development and marketing costs by the number of sales generated. It was always a halo product for the company, and a tip of the hat to the creative pros who helped Apple become a serious contender in the PC market.
But the company’s switch to Apple Silicon led some of us to question whether the machine even had a role any more.
This view seemed confirmed when Apple announced that you could spec up the 2023 Mac Studio to the exact same configuration as the new Mac Pro. There were just four differences between them: ports, PCI cards, vents, and… wheels.
Both offer the same maximum configuration of:
- 24-core CPU, 76-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine
- 192GB unified memory
- 8TB SSD storage
We noted at the time that the better cooling will extend the time before thermal throttling kicks in, and those PCI card slots can be used for things like video capture cards, but the differences did seem even smaller than ever.
Pro buyers also using the 16-inch MacBook Pro
Top comment by AppleDev
I have a feeling that it is mainly users with expensive capture cards and SAN (Storage Area Network) cards for their existing Mac Pros that will mainly be buying this. A pretty small market. However, that doesn't mean Apple won't be releasing something in the next couple years that brings the category back. There are certainly missed opportunities in spaces that could benefit from cards.
The idea of high-end professional users using a MacBook instead of a Mac Pro would once have seemed laughable. But the top-end Apple Silicon 16-inch MacBook Pro changed that, according to pros interviewed by The Verge.
Zach Passero, who does editing, animation, and visual effects for films, has been a diehard Mac Pro user for over a decade. “I’m still a big champion of the old trash can,” he says, referring to the oft-maligned 2013 design. He was skeptical when the M1 Max chip was announced — he’d never envisioned that a laptop could handle his heavy workload. But he gave the 16-inch MacBook Pro a shot and was surprised — and a little bit sad — to find that it felt just as fast as his older desktop. “Video editing, even doing effects, compositing, animating — it has been a smooth and fluid process,” he says. “I’m like, ‘This might actually suffice for a while.’”
Passero still loves the Mac Pro, but he can’t justify buying the latest one when his laptop is so good. “There’s something about my experience using the M1 chip where I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I need the full Mac Pro,’” he says, with some disappointment in his voice.
Filmmaker Kevin Ford agreed.
Kevin Ford, who shoots and edits documentaries, has been using the Mac Pro for years. He’s owned both the tower models and the trash can. But he switched to the latest 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 Max a few weeks ago, and he’s not looking back — it can do everything he needs. He can cut 4K and 6K footage. He can color correct. He can even create graphics and titles. As a bonus, he can now do it all on the road; the last project he cut, which is now on Netflix, was done entirely in hotel rooms and airplanes.
Even the PCI cards aren’t the dealbreaker we might have imagined. Evan Stone, a senior iOS engineer at the software development agency MartianCraft, said that while internal slots would be a nice-to-have, you can run most of them in a Thunderbolt-connected external enclosure. Only PCI-E 4 x16 cards require the Mac Pro.
Indeed, of the 20 demanding users The Verge spoke to, only one saw a reason to buy the Mac Pro – and that was for the bizarre reason that “I don’t trust that small thing [the Mac Studio].”
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