Given Apple’s current locked-down trajectory with the Mac, the Mac Pro was gonna die eventually, and it’s for the best that it does given it was reduced to little more than a massively overpriced Mac Studio grafted onto a useless PCIe backplane; a $12k grift, basically.
PCs at least are still modular and expandable; for now.
The M-series Mac Pro was always for companies which were going to rack them and use them in render farms. Normal people was never its intended market. It was more of an Xserve successor.
Apple would need to design a different CPU for the Mac Pro, and the limited market doesn’t make it feasible. Descending the M-series CPUs from the A-series limits what the designs can do.
There are rumors of a CPU split in the Apple lineup. iPhone, iPad, iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook get the A-series, and MacBook Pro, Mac Studio. Mac Pro get the M-series. That would make sense, and might give them some room to expand the “Pro” procs.
I thought there were already some M-series iPads that gave some actual workstation laptops a run for their money though.
iPads have always had the problem of having waaaaay way more compute power than they were ever capable of utilizing.
Yep. The iPad Pro lineup is M-series.
Or - and this is a wild theory - just cripple the ones using a-series chips and keep the m-series the same but charge more.
A-series would already be at a disadvantage due to being designed for iPhones and the design parameters that entails compared to the M-series.
I can’t remember if it’s announced or rumored, but I think there’s an entry-level MacBook coming with an A17?