Today marks another end of an era for Apple as the company has confirmed with 9to5Mac that it officially discontinued the aging Mac Pro, as Apple has pulled all references to the Mac Pro from its website as of this afternoon. If you try to go to the Mac Pro’s webpage now, it will redirect you to the Mac page instead. I pretty much saw the demise of this workstation coming, although it was sooner than I anticipated, and it’s safe to say that the Mac Studio has now been the spiritual successor to the Mac Pro.
When it was introduced back in March 2022 (four years ago), the original Mac Studio introduced the very first highest-end Apple silicon chip: the M1 Ultra, which was leaps ahead of the Intel Xeon processors in the 2019 Mac Pro in terms of both raw workstation-class performance and efficiency. When Apple updated the Mac Studio at WWDC 2023, Apple did bring Apple Silicon to the Mac Pro for the first time with the M2 Ultra, concluding the transition from Intel processors to Apple Silicon for the Mac. However, since then, the Mac Pro has been far neglected as it hasn’t received any new hardware upgrades since, even when Apple updated the Mac Studio with the M4 Max and M3 Ultra last March. The writing was clearly on the wall for the Mac Pro.
On a related note, when Apple introduced the new Studio Display XDR, it immediately discontinued the Pro Display XDR, which was infamous for not including the $999 Pro Stand, but it was also introduced alongside the redesigned Mac Pro back in 2019, hence the similar lattice patterns. With the Pro Display XDR’s demise, this could further indicate that the Mac Pro will receive the same fate; after all, when Marques Brownlee reviewed the Studio Display XDR (video below), he said that “Studio is the new Pro,” and it appears he was right after all as Apple is apparently doing away with the “Pro” branding for its workstation-class offerings. Even Mark Gurman from Bloomberg suggested that Apple is reportedly moving on from the Mac Pro.
We expect the Mac Studio to get upgraded as soon as WWDC 2026, likely with the next-generation M5 Max and M5 Ultra, with built-in Neural Accelerators in every GPU core to take AI performance to new heights once again.
The original Mac Pro was introduced in summer 2006 to replace the again Power Mac G5 and to complete the transition to Intel processors back then, and the Mac Pro lived somewhat of a bizarre life with less frequent hardware upgrades and radical, controversial designs (particularly, the trash-can 2013 design), but the spirit of the Mac Pro lives on in the Mac Studio, bringing workstation-class performance and modularity that satisfies virtually all pro customers who completely takes their creativity to the next level. Apple has completely fulfilled that original vision that the Power Mac G4 Cube had by bringing workstation-class performance in a super-compact form factor (you can read our editorial here if you’re interested).
It’s also worth mentioning that Apple added the MacBook Neo to its Mac lineup early this month, so there were already too many Macs in the lineup. With the discontinuation of the Mac Pro, Apple’s Mac lineup finally makes sense as Apple now offers three desktops and three laptops that fit everyone’s needs:
- Desktops
- iMac (M4)
- Mac mini (M4 and M4 Pro)
- Mac Studio (M4 Max and M3 Ultra)
- Laptops
- MacBook Neo (A18 Pro)
- MacBook Air (M5)
- MacBook Pro (M5, M5 Pro, and M5 Max)
And since Mark Gurman expects all Macs to get updated this year (with M5-generation chips coming to both the iMac and Mac mini), it’s now safe to say that his claim is now more accurate if you think about it.
Let’s give a moment of silence for the Mac Pro, and may its legacy continue to live on in Apple’s history.
