Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro – but it’s just the first of the tower computers to go. The rest will follow soon.
Fruit-sniffers extraordaire 9-to-5 Mac got the news yesterday, complete with official confirmation from Apple itself. It’s official and it’s happened, but there have been warning signs for months – in November 2025, Bloomberg’s Matt Gurman said “The Mac Pro is on the back burner.”
The phantom fruit-flingers of Silicon Valley launched the seven-thousand-buck Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro in June 2023, with an M2 Ultra SoC. It sported seven PCIe slots – but the problem was that cash-rich customers couldn’t add the sorts of expansion that normally go into a PCIe slot… to the extent that Apple publishes a page about PCIe cards you can install in your Mac Pro (2023). Notably, the machine did not support add-on GPUs: only the GPU that’s integrated into the CPU complex along with the machine’s RAM and primary flash storage. The machine also had no RAM expansion whatsoever.
Presumably, this limited its appeal for many traditional buyers, and the machine never saw an M3 or M4 model, let alone the M5 SoC that The Register covered shortly before Bloomberg called the Arm64 cheesegrater’s fate.
Just because Apple failed to make expandible hardware doesn’t mean if won’t still work for PC’s.
The interesting thing is the people who will care the most about this are professional users, who actually did require a machine with real expandability, to stuff full of the likes of SDI video IO cards (eg https://www.aja.com/products/kona-5).
If you ask those people, they’ll undoubtedly gladly tell you how much it sucked dealing with Thunderbolt-to-PCIe expansion cages during the “Trashcan” era in order to use their machine for their work.
While Thunderbolt’s throughput has certainly improved a bunch since then (80Gbps symmetrical or 120/40Gbps asymmetrical for TB5, vs 20Gbps for TB2 back in that era), latency and stability still frankly leave a lot to be desired versus a real PCIe slot.
For people who already perceive Apple devices as overpriced toy computers, their further alienating what was at one point their primary target audience - high-end professional users - will certainly seem like an odd choice.