/ Apple built a chip but cancelled it. Twice.
Mike Alvarez Joined TheTweaks as an emerging tech , startup and launches journalist. He comes up with those things or products which are not there yet and are hardly possible to come close to. He covers the latest technology, startups and new product launches and releases. He worked 4 years in a startup company in Austin and later he joined TheTweaks and he is proving himself here with his commendable writing performance. He is also the publisher of a small consumer robotics newsletter.
There’s a cemetery somewhere in Cupertino, full of silicon that could have revolutionized everything and now Apple has confirmed its existence.
In his recent Power On newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman reveals that, besides merely contemplating the creation of one chip that would outperform all others in the lineup, Apple has created two of them. But then it killed both of them one after another while quietly letting the Mac Pro die until it was eventually discontinued earlier this year.
If you’ve always wanted to know the reason behind the name Pro in Mac Pro and why it never seemed deserving enough of its name, here’s your answer.
In the latest edition of his Power On Newsletter, Gurman said that abandoning the Mac Pro line was not always Apple’s plan. The initial concept was more ambitious and was called the Extreme or the Ultra as it was known then, which would be Apple’s most powerful chip, sitting at the top of the silicon heap.
Gurman said that Apple did have an M2 Extreme and an M3 Extreme chip in its development plans, but quietly dropped both projects due to cost and demand concerns. These were not rumors, not leaked roadmap slides, these were actual chip projects that Apple was developing but never released them.
As Gurman explained, the concept was to give the Ultra chip twice the amount of graphics and main processing cores, essentially making it twice as powerful as the Ultra ever could be. Rumors of the M2 Extreme first emerged in 2022, as Gurman said Apple was working on the chip for its first Apple silicon Mac Pro which will be capable of up to 152 GPU cores and 48 CPU cores, double the specs of M2 Ultra.
Such horsepower isn’t exactly a bargain. Gurman thought it could cost a Mac Pro based on the M2 Extreme could have started at $10,000, with no upgrades added, and such a configuration would be available for a fraction of the professional market.
The cancellation of the M2 Extreme wasn’t a one off decision Apple later reserved. Apple apparently also had plans for an M3 Extreme chip but ended up canceling that one project as well, for similar reasons.
The unconfirmed processors have been said to have twice the number of CPU and GPU cores offered by Apple’s Ultra chipsets, and it’s hard to see how that will translate to a significant performance difference compared to the Mac Studio, as it is today. The final version of the Mac Pro was equipped with the same M2 Ultra chip as the Mac Studio, though the Mac Pro’s enclosure was larger and it had support for expansion via PCIe.
That is the part that hurts those who actually purchase one. While under the hood it provided nothing more than a Mac Studio in a larger box, Pros paid a premium price for a machine.
The Extreme chip wasn’t the only one to suffer. Gurman said that Apple has two other Mac Pro models it was still working on, internally codenamed J170 and J190 that never made it to market. J170 were reportedly new Intel-based Mac Pros built even after Apple committed to its own silicon, with J190 being an M3 Ultra version that would be available at the same time as the M3 Ultra Mac Studio in early 2025.
Neither one shipped. Ultimately, the Mac Pro was discontinued in March, its 20 year reign finally came to an end, with its highest end desktop aspirations left to the Mac Studio.
Gurman is not hopeful for an “M5 Extreme” or “M6 Extreme” of the Mac Pro’s glory someday. He doesn’t expect Apple to reintroduce the Mac Pro anytime soon. Instead, all the horsepower that Apple wants to deliver to power users is going right to the Mac Studio. New M5 Ultra chips equipped Mac Studio models are rumored to arrive as early as this fall and an M7 Ultra Mac Studio is reportedly said to be planned for 2028.
Apple is not giving up on its aim of offering a professional level of performance, it’s just determined the Mac Studio and not a standalone tower is the place for it.
This is a weird tech story, the product that doesn’t have a failure but never got a chance to appear in the market. Apple invested real engineering time and money into producing chips that double the performance of the Ultra tier, only to decide that the market for such a $10,000+ workstation isn’t big enough. From a business perspective, that is definitely the smart choice. Mac Pro had been selling in small numbers prior to its discontinuation. However, in terms of what might have been, it can be hard for the engineers who made something truly innovative, and saw it being rejected twice.
If you’re shopping for a Mac right now, stop waiting for a Mac Pro revival. With the M5 Ultra due to arrive this fall, the Mac Studio is now officially Apple’s flagship and it’s about to be even more powerful if Apple is to be believed.
Tim Cook’s 15 years as Apple’s chief executive officially ended on September 1 and now the torch has been passed on to John Ternus, who is the company’s long-time hardware. It’s Apple’s first leadership change…
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