Honestly I was thinking about writing a post like this article, but Ben Lovejoy at 9to5Mac has beat me too it.

The recent pate of articles from Gurman and their bad news on the Mac Pro has really had me thinking. No Quad Apple Silicon means no performance boost over the Studio. No memory upgrades makes sense, but no external graphics card, means a decided lack of expansion, and a need to spend more upfront, without the possibility of later upgrades.

As for PCI Expansion, sure a video i/o card from black magic would be cheaper than external, and you could put in a fast ssd pci card, but those are damn expensive. Maybe an Apple Accelerator, but like the one in the current, you know it would be quickly added to the next chips, so why bother.

And having more options for storage, I would love that. I so miss my 4 internal slots for spinning hard drives, but more likely I see room for more proprietary Apple SSDs, which would be too expensive and likely not user upgrade-able.

The one thing no articles I have seen talk about would be more Thunderbolt ports, which would be great. I already use two Thunderbolt 4 Hubs, and still lack for ports, but is that and better cooling and maybe room for a second hard drive worth thousands more?

The answer is no. There needs to be a realistic reason for a Mac Pro to exist.

So maybe Apple waits till the M3, when they can do a quad chip design and really do an insane machine, and they go for an iMac Pro right now. I would be dissapointed, but not surprised. Mainly disappointment because I would love to move to 32 inch monitors for my next machine.