Last week, Apple revealed a new Mac Studio equipped with M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips. No, that’s not a typo — the company really did launch a new Mac with chips from two different generations, where the less powerful chip is from the newer iteration. As I’ve written before, it’s a confusing, ridiculous situation, and one that must be driving Apple’s marketing division mad.
But at first, it seemed like there was a glimmer of reasoning behind the decision: Apple could save the rumored M4 Ultra chip for the Mac Pro and bring back some proper differentiation to the Mac lineup. Instead of having the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro offer the same maximum performance (as we have now), the Mac Pro would finally get a sizeable boost to tempt power-hungry pro users.
As Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman put it in his recent Power On newsletter, the M4 Ultra would boast “a newer architecture, far speedier graphics, dramatically better computing performance and superior AI capabilities.” That could be exactly what the Mac Pro has been crying out for.
Except it now looks like we’ll never see that situation come to fruition, as Gurman says the M4 Ultra appears to be completely off the cards.
Over the last few days, Apple told Ars Technica that it won’t be offering an Ultra chip in every Apple silicon generation. If that didn’t hint that the M4 Ultra isn’t on the way, the company also confirmed to French site Numerama that the M4 Max isn’t built with Apple’s UltraFusion tech, which means Apple can’t simply combine two M4 Max chips together to make the M4 Ultra. Apple used conjoined M2 Max chips to make the M2 Ultra, but it looks like that won’t be happening with the M4 generation.
Gurman’s newsletter added that Apple is reluctant to create an M4 Ultra chip from scratch. Doing so would require a difficult, expensive production process and result in a niche chip that probably wouldn’t sell well, making it hard to rationalize for Appe.
Why buy the Mac Pro?
So, where does this leave us? Unfortunately, pretty much right back to where we were before. In the M2 generation, the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro were capable of the same maximum performance, yet the Mac Studio came with a much lower asking price .
Why would you buy the Mac Pro, then? It has more PCIe expansion and additional ports, but does that really justify the much higher cost? For most people, probably not.
Previously, Gurman speculated that the Mac Pro would get the M4 Ultra to differentiate it from the Mac Studio. Now, they’ll have the same chip again. And once again, it’s very hard to justify the Mac Pro over the Mac Studio.
And it’s not just about the power. As Gurman points out, other specs are affected. Right now, the Mac Studio tops out at 512GB memory and 16TB of storage. The Mac Pro, on the other hand, maxes out at 192GB of memory and 8TB of storage.
Ironically, those configurations make the Mac Studio more expensive than the Mac Pro, despite it being positioned as the less-high-end product. If you go on the base configurations, though, the Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) is more powerful than the Mac Pro (M2 Ultra) despite costing almost half the price.
The Mac Pro’s memory and storage options will improve when it gets the M3 Ultra, but that might not be until the fall at the earliest. Until then, the selection of desktop Macs aimed at professionals is a bit of a mess.
The good news is that the Mac Studio will still get you a fantastically powerful computer (even if its chip situation is on the baffling side) that costs a fraction of the Mac Pro. If you’re in the market for a Mac Studio and don’t need the Mac Pro’s PCIe slots or extra Thunderbolt ports, there’s no compelling reason to get the Mac Pro, and there likely won’t be one for the foreseeable future.
But for Mac Pro fans, the situation is far less attractive. With Apple waiting two chip generations and at least two years between pro-level Mac upgrades, it looks like we’ll have a long while before the Mac Pro can properly stand above the Mac Studio.