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If there’s one product everyone wants to see in 2023, it’s the Mac Pro. And a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman makes things even more interesting with a mix of good and bad news.
Good news first. In its weekly Power On newsletter, Gurman says the new Mac Pro will “maintain one of its defining features: easy expansion for additional memory, storage and other components.” Expandability is the biggest question surrounding the new Mac Pro, as Apple’s Mac chips use single memory that isn’t upgradeable after purchase. It’s unclear what Gourmet means by “other components,” but the current Mac Pro includes eight slots for various third-party PCIe cards.
Now for the bad news. Apple scrapped its plans for an “M2 Extreme” chip that would combine four M2 Max chips. Gurman says Apple made this decision during testing because “the complexity and cost of manufacturing the processor” is so large and complex.
So the top-end Mac Pro configuration will now be only slightly better than the top-end Mac Studio, with 24 CPU cores, 76 GPU cores and up to 192GB of memory. It’s still clearly a blazingly fast machine, but the M2 Extreme chip is said to blow it away with 48 CPU cores and 152 GPU cores. As Gourman points out, the lack of ultra-high-end performance could annoy Apple’s most demanding users, who have been waiting more than a year for a new Mac Pro.
Gurman says Apple had planned to introduce a new Mac Pro in 2022, but “multiple changes to its features, a major shift in the company’s plans for high-end processors and a potential shift in its production” pushed back that timeline. It’s not saying when it’ll arrive, but it’s likely to debut at WWDC or a separate Mac event in the fall.
The current Intel-based Mac Pro was launched in December 2019 and has had several revisions since then. It starts at $5,999, almost the same as the top Mac Studio.
