tampering

In 2019 Apple put on sale a spectacular Apple Pro that in its most ambitious version had an equally spectacular price: 62,648 euros. That equipment was still based on Intel chips, but it offered something unusual for Apple: the possibility of easily exchanging some of its internal components. Today Apple has removed it from its website without a press release, without farewells or tributes and without plans to replace it. 20 years later, the Mac Pro is dead. The slow agony of the Mac Pro. Abandoning this product has not been a surprise at all. It had been three years since the Mac Pro he had been “paralyzed” with the M2 Ultra chip while the rest of the Apple Silicon-based range moved forward. And the amazing thing was that Apple I kept offering it from 8,399 euros with that chip, 64 GB of unified memory, 1 TB of SSD and of course that characteristic tower format box with that “cheese grater” front that it was a meme in itself. Of expansions, nothing. This team was different precisely because of that capacity for expansion. It had PCIe slots for specialized cards, and the ability to add storage. That offered some flexibility for professionals who had specific needs that weren’t available on any other Mac. The surname Pro is blurred. In reality, Apple has been telegraphing this farewell for some time. The Mac Pro began to be out of stock months ago both in physical stores and online, but also a few days ago Apple abandoned Pro Display XDR monitors to simply call their new monitors Studio Display. The Pro surname disappears from the range of desktop computers, although it remains important for the rest of the catalog: we have MacBook Pro, we have iPhone 17 Pro/Max, and we have iPad Pro. And it does not seem that those surnames are going to disappear easily here. The M1 changed everything. The problem is that the departure of Apple Silicon and the revolutionary Apple M1 chip He went directly in the opposite direction. The unified memory on the chip makes it impossible to expand, and the M2 Ultra does not support external graphics. The PCIe slots remained the only argument, but they became something with very little meaning because the Thunderbolt 5 port already offered expansion capabilities to external peripherals. The evolution of the design, with that 2013 Mac Pro with the “trash” design, was fascinating, but not necessarily a success. The Mac Studio was the new Mac Pro for years. In reality, the death of the Mac Pro occurred rather in 2022, when Apple presented the first Mac Studio. From that moment on, the Mac Pro proposal was in questionand disturbing comparisons confirmed it: a Mac mini M2 for 719 euros doubled in performance single-core to a 2019 Mac Pro. The Mac Studio was comparatively cheaper and much more powerful, and that made one question inevitable: does the Mac Pro make sense? Apple just definitively answered that question. Three years later, yes, but he has done it. Little Computing Beasts. With its chips from the Pro, Max and especially Ultra ranges, Apple has shown that it is not necessary for a computer to be “big” to prove to be a computing beast. The Mac Studio have proven this for years, and the versions with the M3 Ultra and 512 GB of unified memory are extraordinary machines that today are not only perfect for “regular” professionals, but also for those who work, for example, with AI models locally. These chips have managed to demonstrate that the expansion capacity offered by the Mac Pro is a secondary argument, at least, for Apple. And therein lies the crux of the matter. Don’t touch our machines. Apple has never made it easy for users to upgrade or even repair their devices. Although in recent times it has taken positive steps in that direction, not even those “facilities” are worth it. The company’s obsession with total control of the software and hardware of its devices made the Mac Pro a “dangerous” product for them, because it opened unexplored paths that they surely never wanted to travel. By removing the Mac Pro and focus everything on Mac Studio They regain that control, because Mac Studio cannot be easily expanded. It is possible change SSD driveas in the Mac mini, but it is not a task “for all audiences.” In Xataka | The new Siri will not be Gemini with another face. Apple has helped Google to build what it could not do alone