Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro – but it’s just the first of the tower computers to go. The rest will follow soon.
Fruit-sniffers extraordaire 9-to-5 Mac got the news yesterday, complete with official confirmation from Apple itself. It’s official and it’s happened, but there have been warning signs for months – in November 2025, Bloomberg’s Matt Gurman said “The Mac Pro is on the back burner.”
The phantom fruit-flingers of Silicon Valley launched the seven-thousand-buck Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro in June 2023, with an M2 Ultra SoC. It sported seven PCIe slots – but the problem was that cash-rich customers couldn’t add the sorts of expansion that normally go into a PCIe slot… to the extent that Apple publishes a page about PCIe cards you can install in your Mac Pro (2023). Notably, the machine did not support add-on GPUs: only the GPU that’s integrated into the CPU complex along with the machine’s RAM and primary flash storage. The machine also had no RAM expansion whatsoever.
Presumably, this limited its appeal for many traditional buyers, and the machine never saw an M3 or M4 model, let alone the M5 SoC that The Register covered shortly before Bloomberg called the Arm64 cheesegrater’s fate.
I’m not sold that modular desktops are going away in general. SoCs have some benefits in terms of power usage, but those are most-substantial on phones and least-substantial on the desktop.
My understanding is that memory may move away from DIMMs to CAMM2 to permit for higher speeds, but that’s still a modular system.
Yes. That Apple can do these things because their soc is their market deferential. It’s not an over all market direction.
CAMM has been around for years now but I’ve never seen a single model using them. Even Framework passed on them with their new desktop.
You don’t need to as long as you’re getting sufficient speeds from non-soldered DIMMs, and desktops are generally still using non-soldered DIMMs.