Apple Mac Pro with “M2 Extreme” scrapped, will still come with expandable memory, storage

It’s been three long years since the Mac Pro was redesigned. Back then, Harry Styles was days from releasing his wildly popular second album, the first Pakatan Harapan government was still in power, and the term “corona” was still more closely associated with a Mexican lager than the debilitating pandemic that would befall the world just months later.

This is how much the world has changed since then. In the ensuing period, Apple has revamped its entire lineup of computers with its own processors, kicking longtime partner Intel to the kerb. When the company announced the move at WWDC 2020, it said the transition to Apple Silicon would take two years—a milestone that has long passed. To date, the Mac Pro stands alongside the high-spec Mac Mini as the only Intel-powered Macs still on sale.

The delay in introducing a Mac Pro with Apple Silicon comes down to several factors, said Bloomberg analyst Mark Gurman. These include changes to its features, the silicon itself and even the location of manufacture.

Originally, the Mac Pro was to be offered in two configurations, one with two M1 Max chips (eventually dubbed the M1 Ultra) and another with double the computing power. Apple eventually decided to release the Ultra in the Mac Studio and postponed the Mac Pro to the M2 generation. It then planned to sell the Pro with an M2 Ultra, tipped to incorporate up to 24 CPU cores, 76 GPU cores and an available 192GB of RAM.

Positioned above this model would’ve been a double-Ultra chip that Gurman dubbed the “M2 Extreme”, featuring 48 CPU cores and a whopping 152 GPU cores. However, Apple has likely scrapped this chip due to complexity and cost—the latter would’ve probably pushed the price of the Mac Pro past the USD10,000 (about RM44,255) without any upgrades, which would have curtailed market appeal considerably.

Ditching the “M2 Extreme” would have the added side benefit of freeing up chipmaker TSMC’s production capacity for higher-volume products. Instead, the new Mac Pro is set to be offered solely in M2 Ultra form, and to match the current model’s ability to be specced out with up to 8TB of storage and a whopping 1.5TB of RAM, you’ll still be able to easily install additional memory, storage and other components. Good luck stomaching the RM100,000 or so Apple charges to max out the RAM, however.

Apple is also shifting production of the Mac Pro from China—with final assembly being conducted in the US for American consumers—to Vietnam. The ASEAN country already produces some AirPods and may soon build MacBooks and Apple Watches as well, so it seems to be a logical move for Cupertino. As yet, there’s still no indication as to when we can expect the new Mac Pro, but it will likely arrive before a range of new (and probably extremely pricey) external monitors.