Two years ago, the first Macs with Apple’s own processors came onto the market – and both the press and customers were enthusiastic: Not only are the M chips significantly faster, they are also significantly more economical than the previous Intel processors. This results in very long battery life, hardly any fan noise and less waste heat. Meanwhile, Apple has switched all Mac product lines to “Apple Silicon” – but one is still missing.Apple said at the end of 2020 that the switch to Apple Silicon would be completed in two years – but Apple has obviously achieved this goal: The group still delivers the Mac Pro with Intel chips today. The rumor mill actually expected Apple to introduce a new Mac Pro with Apple Silicon by the end of the year, but there was no announcement and it is no longer to be expected in the last few weeks of the year.
M2 Extreme canceled?
According to various reports, the new Mac Pro should come with two different processor options: M2 Ultra with 24 CPU cores and 76 GPU cores and the M2 Extreme with 48 CPU cores and 152 GPU cores. The M2 Extreme was supposed to be two M2 Ultra chips connected together and it was only going to be used in the Mac Pro. Apple will probably also use the M2 Ultra in a future generation of the Mac Studio.
Now the usually very well-informed magazine Bloomberg claims to have learned that Apple has significantly cut its plans for the Mac Pro: According to journalist Mark Gurman, Apple has canceled the M2 Extreme and the Mac Pro will only be launched with the M2 Ultra. Both cost and complexity issues led to the discontinuation of the M2 Extreme, Gurman said. The “M2 Extreme” option would certainly have cost $10,000 or more – and would be a complete niche product. Apple didn’t want to use scarce development resources on an option that would have attracted few buyers, Gurman said.
RAM and SSD expansion possible
Unlike the Mac Studio and all other Macs with Apple silicon, Gurman says the Mac Pro will be upgradeable in terms of RAM and storage capacity. With all other Macs, the customer must decide at the time of purchase how much RAM and SSD capacity the Mac should have – retrofitting is not possible. This should be different with the Mac Pro: Customers should be able to retrofit memory and SSDs – and possibly even additional cards via PCI Express. However, it is not to be expected that graphics cards from Nvidia or AMD can be retrofitted, since this contradicts the “unified memory” memory model.
Slower than predecessor?
Very few customers will have ordered the largest expansion stage of the current Intel iMacs – but the new Mac Pro with M2 Ultra could be slower than its predecessor. While it is to be expected that the 24-core M CPU will outperform the 28-core Intel Xeon CPU in the current Mac Pro, things are different on the GPU side: the Intel Mac Pro can can be ordered with 4 AMD Radeon Pro W6800X GPUs with GDDR6 memory – and here the GPU of the M2 Ultra will be clearly inferior.