The 2023 WWDC merited a big dose of "FINALLY!" Apple's transition to Apple Silicon is finally complete and with that came the release of the new Mac Pro. Despite that fact, it also sounded the death knell for the Mac Pro. Somewhere in the background was John Dunne speaking softly to the Mac Pro saying,

Send not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

Another silent chant could also be heard:

The king is dead. Long live the king

Mac Studio

Before the Mac Studio was announced, the word on the street called Rumor was that Apple would be releasing an all new form factor for the Mac Pro. It was to be much smaller, kind of like a tall Mac mini. Some were calling it the Mac Pro mini. As it turns out, those rumors were spot on.

Of course, Apple didn't call it the Pro mini. They called it the Mac Studio. That left people to wonder what exactly Apple was planning for the actual Mac Pro. Could they really make it powerful enough to maintain a performance lead over the new powerhouse of a computer? Some even speculated that Apple was getting out of the Pro game for good. They were mostly right.

The newly released Mac Pro is the exact performance duplicate of the Studio Ultra. There is no amount of money you can spend on a Mac Pro that will get you better performance than what you get with an equally equipped Stdio. And to be sure, you can get an equally equipped Studio.

The differences between the two machines is shockingly little:

1. The Pro comes in a bigger chassis.
2. The Pro has PCI expansion slots.
3. The Pro costs $3,000 more.

Even that makes the differences seem bigger than they really are. Those expansion slots are not very useful because you will not be able to use cards that you might want to try such as popular video boosters. Forget it! You cannot upgrade the ram once you buy it. And there is not even a thermal advantage for the Pro to exploit. Unless you are involved with making Avatar 3, you are never going to use those slots.

That means when Apple built the Studio, they built a performance dead end for this generation of Apple Silicon that even the Mac Pro could not overcome. There is nowhere for them to go. This seems to have been a purposeful move on their part. Apple has set a pattern of introducing their most powerful Apple Silicon chip in the non-Pro models. To give the Mac Pro an advantage, they would have to give the Mac Pro the M3 (which isn't ready yet) and artificially hold everything else down to the M2 for a year. After that, the Mac Pro would have to be first in line for the new tech.

That is not the rout Apple chose to take. Instead, the Mac Pro is a slow follower of the rest of the line when it comes to Apple's fastest chip. I suspect the Mac Pro will never be faster than the fastest Mac Studio. That means that Apple has given up on making the Mac Pro the flagship performance king. That is indistinguishable from Apple just giving up on the Mac Pro altogether.

There was a credible rumor floating around that Apple was working on a monstrous graphics processor specifically for the Mac Pro. But for whatever reason, those plans were scrapped or delayed and this is what we ended up with. For the Mac Pro believers, there is a sliver of hope that they will complete that chip in time for the next one and return the Mac Pro to performance dominance. My gut says they scrapped the project because they no longer want to play in that space.

I was never really in the market for a Mac Pro. I would have drooled over a 27" iMac Pro with Apple Silicon. Even so, it was nice to imagine that one day I would be wealthy enough to buy a Mac Pro and put it on my oversized desk and practice my supervillain laugh as I plotted to take over the world. Now, I don't even have that fantasy.

There are no aspirational Macs any more. There is only the better version of a Mac I already have. What Apple is calling the Mac Pro is nothing more than a form-factor option for the Studio. You can get the compact, the expansion tower, or the rack mount of what is not just essentially, but exactly the same computer. I am rocking the entry-level M1 Mac Studio. I have no real desire to buy a Studio Ultra. At the moment, that $4,000 would be better off doing almost anything else. But remember, I am not the target audience for this thing.

As it happens, almost no one should even consider the current Mac Pro. It will give you no advantage over the Studio Ultra. The Studio Ultra is the only Mac Pro that pros should be considering. They don't need me to tell them that. Practically no Mac Pro owner is going to re-up. The people who were sitting around waiting for the M-series Mac Pro to come out are angry and sad all at the same time. More than anyone, they know the era of the Mac Pro is over.

Hopeful Possibilities

As Tim Cook might say, the Mac Pro is a product that remains in the lineup, for now. But Apple giving up the Mac Pro might not be such a bad thing. The Studio is already faster than any Mac Pro that came before it. So we are not really losing overall power. Studio Ultra is professional-grade hardware. Now, Apple has more attention to give to that product which is much more affordable than the Intel Mac Pro.

Another benefit is that Apple might now have a little attention to offer to the flagging iMac lineup. Any version of the iMac has to outsell the Mac Pro by several orders of magnitude. More people will benefit from enhancements to the iMac than the Mac Pro.

Finally, the price ceiling of a high-performance Mac just came down. You no longer need $50k+ to get the fastest Mac Apple makes. It is also worth noting that the most desirable Mac in the world just got even more desirable without a price increase. The 15" MacBook Air costs exactly what the 13" with all the cores would have cost before WWDC. At $1,299, it feels like a price cut. Speaking of which, there was a real price cut to the 13" model.

Conclusion: The other pro

As the sun sets on the Mac Pro, it rises on the Vision Pro. Consumers didn't even know the Mac Pro existed. Soon, professionals are going to have a new piece of pro hardware to consume their time attention, and money.

The Vision Pro is a technical marvel and will be the topic of another article. But for now, it is so intriguing that few pundits have even noticed the death of the Mac Pro. We have already moved on to the next thing. Content makers should take note: no one cares how fast your hardware is or even what you used to make your content. They only care about the experiences you unlock for them. The Vision Pro offers a whole new universe of possibilities. And that universe is almost ready for colonization.

David Johnson