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And what about that $2,000 Afterburner card you added to the Mac Pro? It turns out the new M1 Pro chips have dedicated video encode/decode engines that are more powerful than the Mac Pros Afterburner. If early Geekbench scores are to be believed, the base-model 20-core M1 Ultra Mac Studio ($3,999) outperforms a maxed out 28-core Intel Xeon Mac Pro ($12,999). But let's call it out it was uncomfortable to see the transition to Apple silicon begin less than a year after folks had invested so much money into these powerhouse Intel machines.īut the awkwardness didn't stop with M1, each time Apple announced a new chip, first the M1 Pro & M1 Max in the MacBook Pro and most recently the M1 Ultra in the new Mac Studio, the features and performance gains of Apple Silicon have begun to outshine the Mac Pro. I'm confident Apple will support Intel-based Macs for the foreseeable future, and besides, those that bought these machines for their workflow out of need rather than want will still get years of use to satisfy their investment. Now the announcement to Apple Silicon didn't obsolete the just-released Mac Pro. And then, six months later, Apple silicon happened. Starting at $5,999 and climbing to an astonishing $52,199 (max specs + optional Mac Pro Wheels), the Mac Pro gave Pros, with the proper budget, the ability to create the most powerful Mac Apple had ever made. Now customers could create the ultimate Mac to their hearts/budgets content: from an 8-core up to a 28-core Intel Xeon, the ability to have up to 1.5TB of RAM, dual Radeon Pro graphics cards, and an optional dedicated Apple Afterburner card for video decoding. Returning to the tower and modular frame of the first-generation, this Mac Pro addressed both the thermal and expansion issues that plagued the trash can Pro. That Mac Pro, the successor to the 2013 trash can, debuted at WWDC 2019 and was released later that winter. This concern over the Mac Pro & developer relations soured to the point that Apple held a rare town-hall meeting in 2017 to gather feedback and assure pros that the Mac Pro they had been hoping for was on the horizon. This Mac Pro shook the confidence of many in the Apple community who felt Apple either didn't care about them or were incapable of delivering a Pro-grade tower. The result was a Pro device that didn't see any regular updates, going an astonishing 2,182 days (that's six years!) before it was ultimately discontinued in late 2019. It was minimally upgradeable, and its singular cooling system could not keep pace with updating chips and graphics. But beautiful though the Mac Pro was, it quickly became apparent that Apple had painted themselves into a thermal corner. The overhauled design featured a polished stainless steel body, was cooled by a single fan, and manufactured in the United States. Then in 2013, Apple teased a completely new ground-up redesign of the Mac Pro, a sleek & shiny aluminum cylindrical design that was touted as having "twice the performance" of the old Mac Pro.