According to a report from tech site 9to5Mac on March 26, Apple has officially discontinued the Mac Pro and removed it from its website. The company has also confirmed there are currently no plans to release a successor.
The Mac Pro started at $6,999 in the US and 55,999 yuan in mainland China. It has now been fully replaced by the Mac Studio, which has become Apple's flagship desktop for professional users.
The current Mac Studio is powered by the M3 Ultra chip and features a much more compact design. Apple is expected to update it with an M5 Ultra chip later this year.
The Mac Pro last received a major update in 2023 with the M2 Ultra chip, but its tower-style body has remained unchanged since 2019. Because of its extremely high price, the Mac Pro never really caught on with the broader market.
In recent years, its capabilities have increasingly overlapped with the more affordable Mac Studio, pushing the Mac Pro further to the sidelines in Apple's lineup. Sales were very low, and over the past few weeks Apple has been quietly clearing out remaining stock from retail channels.
9to5Mac points out that the decline of the Mac Pro can actually be traced back to the controversial "trash can" model launched in 2013. That cylindrical design packed all components around a central cooling core. While it ran quietly, its thermal performance was limited.
Worse still, the 2013 version removed PCIe expansion slots for graphics cards and relied only on Thunderbolt 2 ports for expansion. This design failed to keep up with the rapid development of GPU technology, making it impossible to install high-end graphics cards later on.
Apple eventually apologized to professional users and released a new tower-style Mac Pro in 2019 with eight PCIe slots. However, over the past 13 years, the Mac Pro has only seen three major updates in total.
