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.

  • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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    4 hours ago

    Do I really miss it? It never once came up in any practical situation.

    You would buy a mobo and a CPU and put them together and not think about the specific buses or controllers you have available, unless you had a very specific reason to.

    Unless we’re talking about a mobile power constrained device, I certainly would rather have expandable RAM and graphics cards then everything slammed in a single unchanging chip.

    And again, the fact that the author states that Nvidia can’t release an integrated SoC because they didn’t buy ARM, when they actively sell an integrated SoC licensed from ARM, makes the entire rest of their “opinion”, untrustworthy.