Apple rumored to shift flagship chip from Mac Pro to Mac Studio

Apple’s desktop powerhouse is rumored to be dethroned in the Mac hierarchy. That shift has left the company with the Mac Pro getting pushed to the back burner, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports. The report also indicates that a planned M4 Ultra chip and the next-generation Mac Pro associated with it have been pushed aside, with resources now being dedicated to a smaller machine in the Studio line.

Why Apple’s strategic pivot now favors the Mac Studio

The Mac Studio is now the sweet spot for many creative pros, delivering close-to–workstation performance in a small footprint and at a fraction of the cost of the Mac Pro. With M2 Max and Ultra options, it straddles the editing, compositing, and music production workloads that until now required Apple’s tower. Analysts at IDC and Canalys have long said notebooks overwhelmingly drive PC shipments, 70–75% in recent years; that leaves traditional towers as a niche. In that environment, prioritizing a high-power desktop with a small footprint is actually where most buyers are now.

Cost dynamics matter, too. The current Mac Pro starts at $6,999, while Mac Studio options start from around $1,999 and escalate as you’d expect. When studios buy dozens of them, the total cost of ownership—hardware plus power consumption and rack space plus maintenance—is a no-brainer in favor of the Studio.

Performance and expandability trade-offs in Apple’s lineup

Apple Silicon altered the pro calculus. When the packaging is combined into a single footprint, as in modern portables and decently sized laptops, unified memory can deliver high bandwidth and low latency that you just wouldn’t otherwise get from user-upgradable parts. The Mac Studio can be configured with up to 192GB of unified memory on M2 Ultra, which is perfectly acceptable for many editorial, color, and audio projects. But the Mac Pro’s classic strengths—lots of PCIe slots, discrete GPU upgrades, and plenty of user-expandable memory—have been eroded in the Apple Silicon age. The current Mac Pro doesn’t even support third-party GPUs on Apple Silicon, undermining one of its traditional selling points.

Windows workstations remain the leader for CUDA-reliant 3D rendering or simulation tasks, or some machine learning tasks that rely on Nvidia RTX 6000–class cards. Nvidia’s stack has continued to demonstrate very strong performance in CUDA-optimized pipelines, through the efforts of benchmark specialists like Puget Systems. Meanwhile, Apple relies on Metal acceleration and dedicated media engines that pulverize ProRes and HEVC tasks—key scenarios for Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and increasingly Adobe Premiere Pro.

Reading the silicon roadmap behind Apple’s desktop plans

Gurman’s report that an M4 Ultra has been axed is intriguing for multiple reasons, although the most obvious one is that Apple hasn’t released an M3 Ultra. The “Ultra” tier relies on two large dies stitched together with Apple’s UltraFusion interconnect, a high-end packaging trick that is expensive and produces fewer chips than mainstream parts. Focusing on Max-class silicon within the Mac Studio could streamline the lineup, simplifying it and eliminating the redundancy of needing a separate tower that provides increasingly limited benefits in the Apple Silicon era.

The shift also follows the way that Apple has neatly positioned its pro stack, from the MacBook Pro for on-the-go work to Mac Studio on a desk and a monitor-first workflow—with either Studio Display or Pro Display XDR.

The Mac Pro, then, is a special-purpose machine that doesn’t deliver clear performance or modularity benefits for the extra money to design and support it.

Signals from the market that support Apple’s Studio focus

Apple’s own financials suggest it is repositioning itself. In the year following its highest-ever Mac revenue, Apple’s revenues fell significantly in this product segment to about a quarter of what it had once been and have never reached that original point again despite plateauing. In a less frothy market, the investment money goes into products with the widest effect. The Studio covers a broader cross-section of pro buyers—small VFX teams and freelance editors, motion designers, audio engineers—than the Mac Pro’s ultra-high-end niche.

Power and noise are also considerations. The M2 Ultra’s performance-per-watt should enable a Mac Studio that punches at or above years-old Intel Xeon Mac Pros while consuming dramatically less power and stays whisper quiet—important in edit bays and soundstages where fans are not welcome. Facility managers take notice when energy use declines and rack density increases.

What creative pros can expect from the evolving Mac Studio

Short term, we should anticipate Apple continuing to iterate on the Mac Studio with next-generation Max GPUs and potentially higher-binned silicon, furthering optimization in pro apps. Blackmagic Design and Adobe continue to tout their Apple Silicon acceleration, while media engines from Apple make multiple 8K ProRes streams in a desktop computer that fits under a monitor arm feasible. For I/O-heavy requirements, Thunderbolt 4 and 10GbE, plus PCIe expansion via external chassis, offer broad compatibility for many—but not all—users.

If you depend on several internal PCIe cards or specialized SDI capture boards, or have GPU-dependent features that Metal doesn’t support, a Windows workstation might still be the weapon of choice. But when it comes to editorial bays, color pipelines built around ProRes, music production, and motion graphics that are optimized for Apple Silicon, the Mac Studio now looks like the go-to professional Mac.

Bottom line on Apple’s pro desktop shift to Mac Studio

Some of Bloomberg’s reporting indicates that Apple is now coalescing its pro desktop strategy on the Mac Studio, which means there is no immediate upgrade path for the existing Mac Pro. With the realities of the market, silicon economics, and software momentum in mind, that is a strategic focus. For most creative professionals, the Studio already is the “pro Mac”—and Apple seems set to make that official.