APPLE SILICON

Trickle-Down Apple Silicon

Making sense of the latest Mac update rumors

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If you’re anxiously looking forward to the debut of the Apple silicon Mac Pro then you probably remember when Apple senior vice president of Hardware Engineering John Ternus said “just one more product to go: ‌Mac Pro‌” during the Mac Studio launch. If not, then you surely at least know that the Mac Pro is the only Mac not yet updated with Apple silicon and that we are well beyond the “about two years” window Tim Cook announced at WWDC in June 2020.

In typical Apple fashion, no explanation has been provided for the delay, leaving us with rumor-mill speculation. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has reported that Apple originally planned to launch the Mac Pro with an M1 chip that would provide the processing power of two M1 Ultra chips. Gurman further reported that the company changed its plan to launch the new Mac Pro with an M2 version of the chip, dubbed the M2 Extreme by Gurman, but canceled those plans due to the chip’s complexity.

Here’s the latest Gurman-derived report from ArsTechnica, discussing both the Mac Pro and Mac Studio:

If rumors are to be believed, Apple has had to scale back its ambitions for the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. A planned performance-boosting “M2 Extreme” chip has supposedly been…