Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro. The venerable desktop computer had a twenty-year run and served as the flagship model in the company’s lineup for most of its lifetime. The company has since removed the product from its website.
The Mac Pro first launched in 2006 as a replacement for the then flagship Power Mac G5. Similar to its predecessor, the Mac Pro was a desktop tower PC with a modular design that allowed the user to replace the CPU, memory, optical and storage drives, and PCI expansion cards.
The basic format of the Mac Pro remained unchanged till 2012, even as it was starting to get long in the tooth. Then, in 2013, Apple announced the controversial redesign, which has since been dubbed the trashcan Mac. This model eschewed the modularity of the previous tower design for a more compact but largely integrated component design, where the only upgradeable components were memory and storage. This model would also eventually get abandoned by the company, which was later revealed to be due to the thermal limitations of the design, which prevented upgrading to more powerful components.
In 2019, Apple introduced the third and final major design of the Mac Pro. This model went back to the modular nature of its ancestors, with everything except the CPU being user-replaceable. This revision was one of the final computers Apple released with an Intel CPU, as the company started the transition to its own in-house ARM-based M-series chips.
The Mac Pro got its M-series update in 2023 with the switch to the M2 Ultra, which would end up being the final update it received in its lifetime. Even though the modularity was unchanged, the switch to the M-series chip limited the type of devices that could be plugged into the PCI expansion slots, which kneecapped the appeal of the computer to enthusiasts. Eventually, it was superseded by the Mac Studio as the most powerful computer in Apple’s lineup, as the Mac Pro received no further updates. The Studio now remains the flagship desktop computer in Apple’s current range.
According to Mark Gurman, Apple had been planning on discontinuing the Mac Pro for a while now. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise, as the product didn’t really serve a purpose anymore in the company’s lineup. It was a big, expensive hunk of metal with lots of empty space on the inside that couldn’t really be filled with anything and no real audience to speak of. Apple has also clearly moved on from the concept of modularity and upgradability in its computers, and an honest-to-goodness Mac Pro would be the antithesis of a modern Mac. It’s no wonder that the company let it languish for years and wanted it gone.
But while computers come and go, the Mac Pro will remain a legend for its timeless aesthetics, effortless modularity, and performance. A true industry icon that surely deserved better.