The Mac Pro is Apple’s last computer that hasn’t transitioned from Intel CPUs to Apple’s own silicon. This leads to the bizarre situation that a current basic model of the Mac mini with M2 Pro is superior to the Mac Pro basic model from 2019, which is still significantly more expensive. Actually expected as the end of the announced two-year chip changeover for the end of 2022, apart from an announcement that the Mac Pro is still coming, nothing has been heard from Apple so far. But there is already a lot of rumbling in the forums, after more and more details leaked out in media reports, which suggest that there is hardly any expandability.
Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman is currently fueling this with a tweet in which he says that the next Mac Pro will not have an upgradeable graphics card and that the random access memory (RAM) will be permanently installed. External GPUs via PCI-E also do not support Apple Silicon Macs. Buyers would therefore have to decide when they placed their order and then make do with this configuration for the lifetime of the Mac. After all: Apple allegedly wants to offer GPUs with up to 76 cores.
What should be different about the Mac Pro
The announcement fits in with the computers with Apple silicon that have been available on the market so far, which, for example, all rely on shared memory for the CPU and GPU, which is permanently installed on the chip. Nevertheless, there was hope in pro user circles that Apple would partly break the mutual dependencies with the Mac Pro and thus justify the expected high price of the devices. After all, the Mac Studio in the M1 Ultra configuration is already a very powerful pro computer, which, however, cannot be changed later by the user.
After all, the SSD memory on the Mac Pro should be upgradeable by users, says Gurman, citing unnamed sources at Apple. In terms of appearance, the future Mac Pro is identical to the current device from 2019. The biggest differences between Mac Pro and Mac Studio are the CPU – the M2 Ultra is expected for the Mac Pro – and an increase in performance through stronger cooling.
(mki)
