The brand-new Mac Studio with M1 Max and M1 Ultra chips, which was largely regarded as a precursor to the Mac Pro, was unexpectedly released by Apple about 11 months ago. It’s a little too similar to the Mac Pro, according to a recent report by Mark Gurman of Bloomberg.
Gurman asserts that Apple is unlikely to release a new Mac Studio “in the near future” in his most recent Power On newsletter. The upcoming Mac Pro, he says, “is very functionally similar to the Mac Studio,” and Apple will probably postpone its chip upgrade by at least a generation to avoid confusing customers.
When it “may be able to better differentiate the Mac Studio from the Mac Pro,” Gurman claims Apple is more likely to “never update the Mac Studio or hold off until the M3 or M4 generation.” In addition to internal storage slots, the Mac Pro is anticipated to have an M2 Ultra chip.
We mentioned the potential for overlap with the Mac Studio in our review of the new M2 Mac mini. Currently, the M2 Pro Mac mini costs $1,999, which is the same price as the Mac Studio with an M1 Mac processor, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage.
This year, either at WWDC or in the fall, Apple is anticipated to make the Mac Pro official. After the M2 Pro Mac mini was introduced in January to replace the outdated Core i5 Intel model, it is the last Mac to still have an Intel processor.
