From Evan Selleck at Apple Insider, a great article on expansion chassis for Macs.
With the ridiculous $3000 for a Mac Pro over a Mac Studio, these expansion Chasis may seem a good choice for those not needing the PCI speed so much (for super fast storage).
This one goes into the weeds, but I think hits the nail on the head for the processor for the Mac Pro. It has to be a dual ultra, but that means likely a M2 dual Ultra, the M2 Extreme.
I am still not sure on the expandable ram, as it would be so much slower than the RAM in the chip, but pci expansion does make sense for so many things. And all the extra thunderbolt they could add.
Not part of this video, but what if this is right and it is a smaller MacPro and the processor is on a daughter card that could be upgraded, leaving the pci slots and extra ram if that is workable. That could be an ”upgradeable” Mac Pro for sure.
Well the Mac Studio has gotten me excited for the Mac Pro, though if it really is an M2, I think WWDC might ge pushing it, and the 2023 rumors may be true.
This is because PCIe 6.0 has officially been released, though there is no hardware that supports it yet, while the 2019 MacPro is on PCI 3 which was released in 2010. It is pretty bad since PCIe 4 was released a 2 years before the MacPro, and PCIe 5.0 has been out since 2019.
I am still excited for the next MacPro, though I doubt it will have any user available PCIe slots anyway, though hopefully it’s hard drive attaches faster than PCI 3. Likely it’s only expansion will be Thunderbolt 4 (which it will hopefully have more than 2 buses and 4 ports).