The Mac Pro, which you may know as the ‘cheese grater’ because of its perforated metal chassis, is the remaining Apple Mac product without an Apple Silicon processor option. Given that Apple initially estimated it would transition all Macs away from Intel chips in around two years following the summer 2020 announcement of its own architecture, the Mac Pro probably should have had its refresh by now. So, what’s the hold up? Writing in his weekly Power On newsletter, Gurman cites changes to the proposed features, the potential location of manufacturing and a change in Apple’s high-end processing strategy, based on how much it believes consumers would be willing to pay. With the latter in mind, Gurman says Apple has canned a proposed Mac Pro with an “M2 Extreme” (his terminology) chip, which would effectively be a “double M2 Ultra” chip. Given the M2 Ultra may have 24 CPU cores, 76 graphics cores and a max 192GB of memory, the hypothetical Extreme, may have doubled those specs to 48 CPU and 152 GPU. Gurman writes: “But here’s the bad news: The company has likely scrapped that higher-end configuration, which may disappoint Apple’s most demanding users — the photographers, editors and programmers who prize that kind of computing power.” Apple has decided to save those production resources for machines that are likely to sell in greater volumes, according to the report. Gurman says Apple is also concerned about the prospective cost of an M2 Extreme-based Mac Pro, as it would cost around $10,000 at a base level. When it does eventually arrive, the Apple Silicon Mac Pro would likely pack the M2 Ultra, which we imagine would still cost a pretty penny. Users will also be able to customise with “additional memory, storage and other components,” according to Gurman’s newsletter.
