Apple retires the Mac Pro with no plans for a successor, leaving the Mac Studio as its only high-end desktop

Apple has pulled the plug on its long-running tower workstation line, discontinuing the Mac Pro. The tech giant confirmed to 9to5Mac that there are no plans for future Mac Pro hardware. The Mac Studio will now sit at the top of Apple's desktop lineup, powered by the M5 Ultra, which is due for release in the first half of this year.

Apple has since removed the Mac Pro from its website, with the buy page now redirecting users to Mac's homepage. For professional users, the Mac Studio is available in M4 Max and M3 Ultra configurations, offering up to a 32-core CPU, up to an 80-core GPU, Thunderbolt 5, and support for up to 512GB of unified memory.

The decision is not a surprise. The Mac Pro last received an update in June 2023, when Apple moved the system to M2 Ultra while keeping the aging 2019 chassis. Even then, it sat in an awkward spot. The Mac Studio, equipped with the same chip and offering similar performance, was available for $3,000 less.

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Mac Pro fans hoped the M3 Ultra would finally give the tower the distinction it needed, but that never happened. Instead, Apple debuted the M3 Ultra exclusively in the Mac Studio last year at $3,999, leaving the Mac Pro stranded on an M2 Ultra chip at a languishing $6,999 price point.

The only advantage the Mac Pro held over the Mac Studio was PCIe expansion. But these slots were not even for video cards, given that the GPU with 192GB of shared memory was already built into the chip. In practice, you were paying a significant premium for expansion slots most users would never fully utilize.

Given that buyers had to sacrifice only a handful of ports for better portability and comparable performance, most were simply better off with the more affordable option.

With that, the Mac Studio is now Apple's pro desktop of the future, sitting at the top of what is arguably the strongest Mac lineup in years, at least to me. You now have options ranging from the new MacBook Neo all the way up to the Mac Studio, spanning dramatically different price points, configurations, and form factors.