The last time that Apple updated the Mac Pro was back in June 2023 when Apple introduced the updated model with the M2 Ultra, marking the end of the Mac’s transition from Intel processors to Apple silicon. Of course, that was the only Mac Pro that had Apple silicon before Apple discontinued it entirely in March.
However, apparently, there was more to the story that meets the eye because according to Mark Gurman from Bloomberg, he revealed in his weekly Power On newsletter that Apple apparently had internally developed two Mac Pro models that never saw the light of day.
The two unreleased Mac Pro models had the codenames J170 and J190, and believe it or not, J170 would apparently be an updated Intel-based Mac Pro, and surprisingly, this project was in active development even after Apple already finished transitioning its Mac lineup to Apple silicon. The fact that this model internally existed suggested that Apple even considered offering the x86 option alongside the M2 Ultra model to satisfy more niche workflows that would require an Intel processor, but it’s now evident that Apple is already moving on from Intel Macs as macOS 27 will drop hardware compatibility on Intel-based Macs, and next year’s macOS 28 release will drop Rosetta 2 for running Intel-only apps.
On the other hand, J190 would be an upgraded Mac Pro with the M3 Ultra chip. It was slated to launch alongside the M3 Ultra Mac Studio in March 2023, but as we all know, the release of the Mac Pro with M3 Ultra never came to fruition. Ever since Apple brought Apple silicon to the Mac Pro in 2023, the differences between the Mac Pro with M2 Ultra and the Mac Studio with M2 Ultra were very negligible in terms of raw performance. In fact, the only “real” advantage that the Mac Pro had over the Mac Studio was PCIe expansion slots.
Of course, the Mac Pro could’ve survived if it had some exclusive, more powerful “chip” options over the Mac Studio. In fact, there were even rumors from a couple of years ago that Apple was developing even higher-end “Extreme” Apple silicon chips that would be more powerful by featuring twice the CPU and GPU cores of the corresponding Ultra chips. Of course, development toward those chips has also been canceled, as manufacturing those chips would be too ambitious and expensive, and with the niche market for the Mac Pro, it probably wasn’t worth it for Apple to invest in such development. Since the Mac Pro with Apple silicon felt “redundant” in Apple’s lineup with no real performance advantages over the Mac Studio, it’d make no sense for Apple to launch an updated Mac Pro model, and thus, it was best for Apple to axe the Mac Pro altogether, and Gurman continues to confirm that Apple had no such plans to bring back the Mac Pro.
The Mac Studio has now been a more practical solution for workstation-class performance. The Mac Studio is incredibly compact for its immense amount of power, so it could easily be transferred from studio to studio. We expect Apple to update the Mac Studio with the M5 Max and the M5 Ultra chips as soon as this fall, potentially with up to 768GB of memory depending on the ongoing memory chip supply constraints.
