Mac Pro
Apple ended the fraught and fumbled era of the Mac Pro on March 26, 2026.
On Thursday, March 26, 2026, Apple officially brought the Mac Pro era to a close. It marks the end of a product line that was often fumbled throughout its existence and struggled to find firm footing within Apple’s ecosystem. In the end, the Mac Pro belonged to a different era, one that existed before Apple silicon reshaped the Mac lineup.
In information provided to 9to5Mac on March 26, Apple shared that “the Mac Pro is being discontinued...” and that Apple has “has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.”
In late 2024, I bought a 2013 Mac Pro. It was a computer I could never have afforded or justified when it was first released, but it made for a lovely addition to my modest Mac collection.
But the writing had been on the wall for a very, very long time. At first I was optimistic when Apple announced the redesigned Mac Pro in 2019. It replaced the infamous 2013 “trash can” Mac Pro and, at the time, felt like an attempt to atone for the sins of the previous generation. This new Mac delivered massive expandability, powerful server-grade processors, and a thermal architecture built to handle the most demanding workloads. But less than a year later, Apple introduced Apple silicon, which overnight delivered the kind of performance and architectural structure that rendered that level of cooling unnecessary and expandability largely irrelevant.
Apple also released the 2019/2023 Mac Pro in a server rack mounted config.
Since then, the Mac Pro has struggled to justify its existence. It remained Apple’s most expensive Mac, yet as Apple silicon advanced, other Macs in the lineup began competing toe-to-toe with the Mac Pro’s x86 Intel architecture. With the introduction of the Mac Studio in 2022, Apple demonstrated it could exceed that level of performance in a package a fraction of the size (1/14th) and weight (1/6th) of the Mac Pro.
Mac Pro in Toronto, Canada in June, 2023
There may have been a brief glimmer of hope for the Mac Pro in 2023, when Apple transitioned it to Apple silicon with the M2 Max and M2 Ultra. But the move ultimately stripped away one of its defining advantages: upgradable graphics. At the same time, its expansive cooling system became vastly over engineered for what the machine actually demanded. And when the M4 Pro Mac mini launched in late 2024, outperforming the Mac Pro by 39 percent in single-core and 6 percent in multi-core performance while costing one-fifth as much and being 1/60th the size, its fate was sealed.
By 2023, when the Mac Pro was updated to Apple silicon, its interior had become a vast, empty expanse.
So, on an otherwise unremarkable Thursday afternoon, Apple quietly scrubbed all mention of the Mac Pro from its website, bringing a confusing and somewhat melancholy chapter for the product to a close.
Although I’m not surprised at all, the loss of the Mac Pro is still bittersweet. In my view, the Mac Pro has always been home to some of Apple’s most beautiful industrial design. It was the place where Apple could flex both its design ambition and raw power without restraint. But the form-over-function misstep of the 2013 trash can Mac Pro, followed by a poorly timed transition to Apple Silicon, ultimately crippled the Mac Pro’s appeal in what was already an exceptionally niche market. Like I wrote back in 2022:
“In the past decade, Apple has been guilty of both not doing enough to replace an aging computer and, second, of outclassing its top-of-the-line hardware at a fraction of the cost only a few years after the 3rd generation Mac Pro was announced. From one extreme to the other, it's been hard to trust what was going on with the Mac Pro.”
Apple selling a set of optional Mac Pro wheels for $699 will never stop being funny.
It’s history if flawed, but I look back fondly at the machine and sometimes I like to kid myself into thinking I was ever someone who truly needed something like a Mac Pro. And I never missed a chance, when visiting a larger city (my tiny mall Apple Store never carrier the Mac Pro), to admire and tinker with the one on display. Even at its most impractical, there was always something undeniably special about it.
