The next Mac Pro could miss a major feature of the old ones

The Mac Pro is getting ready for its Apple silicon transition but a new report claims that it’ll miss out on a major feature of older Mac Pro models.

While Apple has already transitioned the rest of the Mac lineup to its own chips and away from Intel, the Mac Pro is still waiting. That’s likely going to change this year but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that the new Mac Pro will miss out on a feature we took for granted on older models.

Writing in his weekly Power On newsletter, Gurman says that the new Mac Pro will ” lack one key feature from the Intel version: user-upgradeable RAM.” That means that the RAM that the Mac Pro ships with will be the amount that it has for the rest of its usable life, just like all other Macs.

That’s particularly disappointing because the Mac Pro has historically been the modular Mac – the one that could be upgraded and expanded as required. However, the use of Apple silicon with its on-board RAM means that isn’t possible, although it had been hoped that Apple would spring a surprise. Gurman says that won’t be the case, but that “there are two SSD storage slots and for graphics, media and networking cards.” There will be at least some modularity, at least.

As for the chip that will power the new Mac Pro, the one with 48 CPU cores and 152 graphics cores has reportedly been canceled. That means that the new machine will ship with the M2 Ultra inside, suggesting that the only difference between it and the next Mac Studio will be the expandability of storage, graphics, and cards.

As for industrial design, Gurman says that the next Mac Pro will look identical to the Intel model that it will replace.