The M3 Ultra could arrive this year, but is Apple abandoning the Mac Pro?

The Mac Studio is one of the best Macs available right now, packing tremendous performance into a surprisingly small package. And, according to TrendForce, it now appears like Apple may take it up a level with a powerful new M3 Ultra chip, which might arrive in just a few months.

It could make its debut at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2024. That largely corresponds to earlier Apple Ultra chips: the M1 Ultra debuted in March 2022, and the M2 Ultra debuted during the WWDC event in June 2023.

The inclusion of the M3 Ultra is significant given how outstanding Apple’s M3 lineup has been thus far. The M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max were released in late 2023, and they all brought significant advances due to the CPUs’ usage of 3nm process technology. In layman’s words, this means that these chips produce a lot of performance without raising the temperature.

The M3 Ultra is expected to take things a step further, as Apple’s Ultra family of CPUs is currently the most powerful option for Mac computers. According to Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman, the M3 Ultra would include a huge 32 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores, making it by far the most powerful Mac processor available.

Is there no Mac Pro update?

TrendForce cites Chinese outlet ICsmart as saying that the M3 Ultra “may debut in [a] revamped Mac Studio mid-year.” Interestingly, neither TrendForce nor ICsmart mention the Mac Pro in their statements.

That could just be a typo. Or it’s possible that Apple is preventing the M3 Ultra from being used with the Mac Pro, either temporarily or permanently. If the M3 Ultra does indeed arrive in June but not the Mac Pro, it calls into doubt Apple’s commitment to the latter device and raises the question of whether the Mac Pro is being phased out.

We wouldn’t be surprised if the Mac Pro omitted the M3 Ultra entirely. The Mac Pro is upgraded significantly less regularly than the Mac Studio: when Apple introduced the M2 Ultra to the Mac Pro in 2023, it was the computer’s first chip update since 2019. In fact, because the Mac Pro was never equipped with an M1-generation chip, Apple may have decided to exclusively equip it with every other Apple silicon chip generation.

We’ll probably find out what Apple’s up to during WWDC in June, but there could be more leaks and rumors before then. Then we’ll see if the Mac Pro is truly going to be left out this year.