Apple Discontinues the Mac Pro After Two Decades, Ending Its Last Modular Desktop as Mac Studio Takes Over
Apple has permanently retired the Mac Pro tower with no successor planned, closing a 20-year chapter in professional computing as the Mac Studio becomes its flagship desktop.
Overview
Apple has officially discontinued the Mac Pro, removing the tower workstation from its website on March 26 with no plans to develop a successor, according to Bloomberg. The decision ends a two-decade run for Apple’s most expandable desktop computer and cements the smaller, more integrated Mac Studio as the company’s flagship professional machine.
What We Know
The Mac Pro was last updated in June 2023 when Apple fitted it with the M2 Ultra chip but left the 2019 “cheese grater” chassis unchanged, according to Tom’s Hardware. In the nearly three years since, the machine sat at its $6,999 starting price without receiving any further hardware revisions, even as the Mac Studio received newer Apple Silicon generations at a fraction of the cost.
Bloomberg had previously reported in November 2025 that Apple planned to retire the model, and the company has now confirmed there are no future Mac Pro designs in development, as reported by Engadget.
The Mac Pro’s lineage traces back to 2006, when Apple introduced the aluminum tower as a successor to the Power Mac G5. Over two decades, the product went through three major redesigns: the original tower, the controversial 2013 cylindrical “trashcan” design that Apple later acknowledged was thermally constrained and unsuitable for upgrades, and the 2019 return to a tower form factor with eight PCIe expansion slots. Despite this long history, only three significant hardware updates occurred across 13 years of Apple Silicon and Intel transitions, according to Tom’s Hardware.
Apple’s transition to its own silicon, beginning with the M1 in 2020, fundamentally altered the Mac Pro’s competitive position. The Mac Studio, introduced in 2022 at a significantly lower price point, matched or exceeded the Mac Pro’s performance in most benchmarks while occupying a fraction of the physical space, according to Engadget. Apple has also recently discontinued the Pro Display XDR monitor that launched alongside the 2019 Mac Pro, replacing it with the new Studio Display XDR.
What We Don’t Know
Apple has not addressed how it plans to serve the subset of professional users who relied on the Mac Pro’s internal PCIe expansion slots for specialized hardware such as audio interfaces, video capture cards, and custom accelerators. The Mac Studio lacks internal PCIe expansion entirely, and while Thunderbolt connectivity offers external alternatives, some professional workflows depend on the lower latency and higher throughput of direct PCIe connections.
It also remains unclear whether Apple will introduce any future desktop product with internal expansion capabilities, or whether the company considers the era of modular professional desktops to be permanently over for its platform.
Analysis
The Mac Pro’s retirement is a logical endpoint of Apple’s silicon strategy. When the company’s system-on-chip designs deliver workstation-class performance in compact, thermally efficient packages, the traditional tower form factor loses its primary justification: the ability to scale performance through add-in cards and modular components.
For the vast majority of creative professionals, the transition is straightforward. Video editors, 3D artists, and software developers will find the Mac Studio more than capable for their workloads. The gap is real, however, for the niche of users who depend on internal PCIe cards that cannot be replaced by Thunderbolt peripherals. These users face a choice between adapting their workflows, moving to external solutions, or in some cases, reconsidering their platform entirely.
The discontinuation also marks a broader industry trend. As system-on-chip architectures mature across the computing landscape, the traditional workstation tower, once the cornerstone of professional computing, is yielding to smaller, more integrated machines that deliver equivalent or superior performance per watt.