If the rumors are to be believed, Apple had to lower its ambitions for the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. The planned performance-boosting M2 Extreme chip has supposedly been cancelled, and some of the benefits people usually associate with the Mac Pro – upgradable RAM and graphics – probably won’t be supported due to the way Apple’s Silicon chips are designed.
Which leaves us, if the latest rumors are true, a high-end Mac Studio with user-accessible storage slots built into the current Mac Pro Tower neo-cheese grater.
That doesn’t leave much room between Mac Studio and Mac Pro—small enough that the Mac Pro might have trouble justifying its continued existence and price premium. One possible solution, as reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, is that Apple could simply skip the M2 generation update for Mac Studio entirely, leaving a larger performance gap between the M1-based Studio models and the M2-based Mac Pro.
“It doesn’t make sense for Apple to offer the M2 Ultra Mac Studio and M2 Ultra Mac Pro at the same time,”Gurman writes in his newsletter (via MacRumors). “Most likely, Apple either never updates Mac Studio or delays the release until the M3 or M4 generation. At this point, the company will be better able to distinguish between Mac Studio and Mac Pro.”
While Gurman is usually able to know these things, it’s worth noting that he’s hedging this prediction as more of a guess, rather than attributing it to any specific source within Apple or one of its suppliers. Of course, this is not an ironclad guarantee that there will be no M2 version of Studio.
Whatever Apple does, it’s clear that the Apple Silicon era doesn’t change anything for Apple desktop users – it’s still hard to know when to expect hardware upgrades, and hard to predict what you’ll get when they arrive.
The Mac mini M2 arrived six months after the M2 versions of the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, although the M1 versions of all three Macs were announced at the same time. The 24-inch iMac (creeping up to its second birthday) may not get an M2 version at all, and there’s still conflicting reports about whether Apple plans to replace the 27-inch Intel or iMac Pro model with the larger Apple Silicon iMac. The new Mac Pro has already exceeded Apple’s original two-year transition to Intel. All of this is significantly less predictable than the iPhone launch schedule every single September (it helps that new iPhones can make or break Apple’s quarterly financials, while new Macs typically can’t).
This discrepancy is almost certainly justified by Mac desktop sales figures; Apple doesn’t disclose laptop and desktop Mac sales in its financials, but it’s fair to bet that laptops outsell desktops. Given the limited number of chips and the limited ability to develop and manufacture new products, it makes sense to prioritize laptops. This is especially true for Macs with Apple Silicon chips, which, due to their power efficiency, generally perform the same whether they are in a laptop or desktop.
It doesn’t make the long and uncertain wait between updates any easier for people who need or prefer desktop customization. If you’ve recently decided not to order the M1 Studio because you wanted to wait for the latest and greatest model, the new Mac Pro may include features you don’t want or cost more than you want to spend, and the M2 Mac mini (just like us liked) may not offer everything you are looking for. You can either get a solid deal on a refurbished M1 Mac Studio, or wait and hope that Apple eventually decides to release a desktop that does exactly what you want.