Why is the Mac Pro?

Apple's high-priced tower is supposed to be the ultimate Mac. If it's not, why does it exist?

- MICHAEL SIMON

If I had to guess, I'd say Apple sold fewer than 1,000 Mac Pros last year. Between the long wait for Apple silicon, the arrival of the Mac Studio (https://fave.co/3QC11xj), and the years-long lack of meaningful upgrades, Apple's most expensive Mac likely only sold to the most desperate or unaware Apple buyers.

That was supposed to change this year. When John Ternus teased the Apple silicon Mac Pro for "another day" at Apple's Peek Performance event last March, he seemed to give a nod and a wink to the most fanciful rumors of a machine significantly greater than the just-announced Mac Studio and its massive M1 Ultra chip. Fast-forward 10 months, and we're still waiting for the Apple silicon Mac Pro (fave.co/3Wd29sr) to arrive.

The safest bet would be the new Mac Pro arriving at WWDC, where the past three models made their debut in 2006, 2013, and 2019. Apple likes to make a big splash with its Mac Pro, and the WWDC keynote is the perfect place to do it, with a captive audience of users ready and willing to spend $5,999 on a Mac "designed for pros who need the ultimate in CPU performance."

When the M1 Ultra brought a whopping 20-core CPU and 64-core GPU to the Mac Studio (fave.co/3QC11xj), rumors began swirling of an "Extreme" chip with an insane 48 CPU cores and 152 graphics cores, more than twice as powerful as the upper-end Mac Studio. It would be the ultimate display of Apple silicon's strength and usher in a new Mac Pro generation that has few, if any peers.