Mac Pro Turns 20 Today, Five Months After Apple Killed It

Apple announced the archetypal Mac Pro 20 years agone today, with the day landing 5 months aft the institution discontinued the instrumentality for good.


On August 7, 2006, Apple unveiled the archetypal Mac Pro, powered by 2 dual-core 64-bit Xeon processors that Apple said made it up to doubly arsenic accelerated arsenic the Power Mac G5 it replaced. It was the past Mac to implicit Apple's modulation from PowerPC to Intel chips, and it launched with PCI Express enlargement slots and a $2,499 starting price.

The Mac Pro rapidly became the instrumentality of prime for video editors, audio engineers, and different originative professionals, peculiarly those moving Final Cut Studio, the editing suite Apple positioned squarely astatine the aforesaid audience. Its 4 interior thrust bays, tool-free case, and PCIe enlargement slots made it casual to configure for demanding workloads, and Apple kept the gait of updates brisk successful its aboriginal years, adding an eight-core configuration successful April 2007 and pursuing with a refreshed basal model successful January 2008. That dependable cadence of upgrades continued done 2012, a crisp opposition to the agelong droughts that would specify the machine's aboriginal years.

The Mac Pro remained arsenic Apple's nonrecreational flagship for astir the adjacent 2 decades since its launch. That positioning kept the instrumentality niche, and Apple's attraction to it was inconsistent.

The clearest illustration came successful 2013, erstwhile Apple replaced the classical tower with a radically redesigned cylindrical exemplary nicknamed the "trash can" Mac Pro, built astir a azygous cardinal "unified thermal core." The trash tin went unrefreshed for six years, a beingness successful computing terms, earlier Apple apologized to its pro idiosyncratic base and admitted the plan was a mistake.

In a 2017 interview, Craig Federighi said Apple had "designed ourselves into a spot of a thermal corner," having built the instrumentality astir GPU workloads that ne'er materialized arsenic broadly arsenic the institution expected. A much accepted tower, with 8 PCIe slots, arrived successful 2019.

Even aft that redesign, the Mac Pro's presumption kept eroding. The Mac Studio delivered astir identical show successful a smaller, acold cheaper package. Once the Mac Pro moved to Apple silicon with the M2 Ultra spot successful June 2023, add-in cards similar the Afterburner mislaid support, leaving PCIe enlargement arsenic adjacent to its lone remaining borderline implicit the Studio, a slim vantage for a instrumentality that started astatine $6,999.

Apple discontinued the Mac Pro connected March 26, 2026, pulling it from its website. The institution said it has nary plans to plan a caller version, and nary aboriginal exemplary is coming.

The announcement landed 3 months earlier Apple raised prices connected 14 products, including Macs and iPads, to offset the rising outgo of representation chips. The ‌Mac Studio‌'s M3 Ultra configuration jumped $1,300, from $3,999 to $5,299, portion the entry-level MacBook Pro roseate $300, from $1,699 to $1,999.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said that "price increases are unavoidable," adding that Apple had tried to shield customers from rising representation costs but "the concern has go unsustainable." Cook likened the shortage to "a hundred-year flood," saying helium had "never seen thing similar it successful immoderate country successful implicit 40 years."

Applying that aforesaid astir 33% leap seen connected the M3 Ultra ‌Mac Studio‌ to the Mac Pro's $6,999 starting terms would person pushed a basal configuration supra $9,300, with nary other RAM, storage, oregon GPU cores factored in, a terms improbable to determination galore units of a instrumentality that was already selling successful tiny numbers.

With the Mac Pro gone, the Mac Studio is present Apple's astir almighty desktop, though it lacks the tower's interior PCIe enlargement slots. Apple's adjacent ‌Mac Studio‌ refresh is expected to bring the M4 Ultra spot to the machine.
This article, "Mac Pro Turns 20 Today, Five Months After Apple Killed It" archetypal appeared connected MacRumors.com

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