Apple officially pulled the plug on the Mac Pro on Thursday, scrubbing its most expensive desktop computer from its website. Links that used to go to the top-end machine now redirect to the overall Mac page.
Quietly killing the machine brings an ignominious end to the $6,999 computer that Apple had not updated in years.
Apple kills Mac Pro
Apple launched the original Mac Pro in 2006, housing powerful internals inside a massive aluminum chassis. Designed for professionals like video editors with the most demanding of workloads, it featured hardware (including Intel Xeon processors) that Apple said made it “the workstation Mac users have been dreaming about.”
A radically styled — but ultimately deeply flawed — cylindrical Mac Pro arrived in 2013. Its eye-catching design, and lack of expandability options, earned it the dubious nickname the “trash can Mac Pro.”
The latest incarnation of the Mac Pro, introduced in 2019 just before the switch to Apple silicon began, featured a bold design with a cheese-graterish front and powerful components.
It also restored the Mac Pro’s original mission: providing an expandable machine capable of handling the most demanding and niche performance uses around.
“We designed Mac Pro for users who require a modular system with extreme performance, expansion and configurability,” said said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, in a press release at the time. “With its powerful Xeon processors, massive memory capacity, groundbreaking GPU architecture, PCIe expansion, Afterburner accelerator card and jaw-dropping design, the new Mac Pro is a monster that will enable pros to do their life’s best work.”
- See also: Ultimate power: Top 9 Mac Pro setups
This version of the Mac Pro arrived alongside the similarly styled Pro Display XDR, which started at $4,999. Apple discontinued the high-end monitor earlier this month when it released the Studio Display XDR and an updated Studio Display. (See Cult of Mac’s review: The Studio Display XDR is the final boss of all Mac displays.)
Apple silicon starts to make Mac Pro pointless
However, the following year, Apple released its first M1 chip and began its march away from Intel processors. The ferocious performance of Apple silicon proved astonishing, with the M1-powered MacBook Pro outperforming the Mac Pro in some tests.
Apple updated the Mac Pro to an M2 Ultra chip in 2023, then left it alone. The writing was on the wall. (See also: Why Apple killing the Mac Pro makes sense.)
The much smaller Mac Studio — powered by an M3 Ultra chip — became the most powerful computer in Apple’s lineup in 2025. It lacks the Mac Pro’s massive size, which limits its expandability options. But the latest versions of Thunderbolt and USB-C offer such high throughput that adding internal cards seems much less important these days.
Apple told 9to5Mac on Thursday that “it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.”
Lewis Wallace is the managing editor of Cult of Mac and author of our weekly newsletter, The Weekender.
He’s a San Francisco-based writer and editor specializing in technology and culture. He loves his iPhone, hates Siri, and appreciates any hardware that combines form and function.
Prior to Cult of Mac, he juggled words and ideas as culture editor at Wired.com, homepage editor at TechTV, news product manager at NBCi, copy editor at PC World, reporter at The (Hayward) Daily Review and editor in chief of EveryBody’s News in Cincinnati.
He earned a bachelor of general studies degree with a journalism certificate from the University of Cincinnati. While in school, he worked as the entertainment editor of The News Record and as editor in chief of Clifton Magazine.
He’s also a bass player, who’s recorded and performed around the United States with Those Darn Accordions, The Electric Boogie Dawgz and The Mad Maggies. When not writing, editing or laying down bass lines, he plays darts and serves on the board of the San Francisco Darts League.
