Apple’s introduction of an Apple Silicon Mac Pro has been highly anticipated by tech enthusiasts and professionals alike, as it represents the last model in the entire Mac range to not be offered with an Apple Silicon chip.
While rumors and speculation have suggested that an M2 chip-powered Mac Pro could be released as early as 2023, it seems that the top-end variant of this model may not be as powerful as once thought.
According to reports from Mark Gurman’s “Power On” newsletter for Bloomberg, Apple has decided to pull back from offering a Mac Pro with an “M2 Extreme” chip due to production problems.
This chip was expected to be a doubling down of the Ultra chip concept, combining two M2 Ultra chips into a single piece of silicon to offer an impressive 48 CPU cores and 152 GPU cores. However, the complexity and cost of manufacturing the M2 Extreme chip have led to its cancellation, and the high-end Mac Pro variant has been scrapped.
Instead, the Mac Pro will use an M2 Ultra chip, which will still offer a significant boost in performance with its 24 CPU cores and 76 GPU cores, as well as support for up to 192 gigabytes of Unified Memory.
It is worth noting that the M2 Extreme chip was rumored to be the reason for the relatively slow introduction of a new Mac Pro, with Gurman stating in July that Apple had an M1 Mac Pro ready to go, but chose to hold off on its release in favor of developing the more powerful M2 Extreme chip.
Despite the reduced potential computing power of the M2 Ultra chip, Gurman insists that Apple will still offer some level of expandability for the Mac Pro, including options to increase the memory, internal storage, and other components. This is good news for professionals who rely on the Mac Pro for demanding workloads and need to be able to customize their hardware to meet their specific needs.
In addition to the M2 Ultra Mac Pro, Gurman reports that an M2 Pro Mac mini and M2 Ultra Mac Pro are also in testing for potential 2023 launches. There are also rumors of M2 Pro and M2 Max versions of the 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro being developed, suggesting that Apple is continuing to push the limits of its M2 chip technology across its entire product line.
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