Apple Retired the Mac Pro, and Nearly Gave It a Chip Twice as Powerful as M3 Ultra

When Apple retired the Mac Pro earlier this year, it felt like the end of an era. For years, the Mac Pro was the company’s answer to filmmakers, 3D artists, engineers, and anyone who needed as much computing power as money could buy.

But it turns out Apple didn’t always plan to end the lineup. In fact, according to a new report from Bloomberg, the company came surprisingly close to building its most powerful Mac ever before abandoning the project altogether.

Apple had bigger plans for the Mac Pro

The original idea was ambitious. As Apple transitioned from Intel processors to its own Apple Silicon chips, the company reportedly wanted the Mac Studio and Mac Pro to serve different audiences. The Mac Studio would get Apple’s “Ultra” chips, while the Mac Pro would go a step further with an even more powerful processor internally referred to as the “Extreme.”

Bloomberg reports: “I’m told Apple had developed both M2 Extreme and M3 Extreme chips before winding down those projects due to cost and demand concerns.”

The Extreme chip was reportedly designed to offer roughly twice the CPU and GPU cores of Apple’s Ultra chips. That would have made it the most powerful processor Apple had ever built.