The Mac Pro Conundrum: Power, Versatility, and A Hefty Price Tag

In a landscape dominated by cutting-edge tech, Apple’s latest iteration of the Mac Pro presents us with a puzzling predicament. As we delve deeper into the Mac Pro’s configuration, its parallels to the new Mac Studio with the Max GPU are unmistakable. This base model of the Mac Pro is priced at $6,999, significantly higher than the Mac Studio’s $3,999 price tag. So, the question that inevitably surfaces is: What extra perks does one reap from the Mac Pro’s additional $3,000 cost?

The Specs: Where’s the Extra Value?

The Mac Pro and Mac Studio share striking similarities. Both boast a hefty 64GB of unified memory and a 1TB SSD. Yet, the Mac Pro’s high-end price point would suggest otherwise. Essentially, you’re shelling out an extra $3,000 for the privilege of utilizing a plethora of open PCIe slots, which in all fairness, can be a potent tool.

Mac Studio
- Price: $3,999
- 64GB Unified Memory
- 1TB SSD
Mac Pro
- Price: $6,999
- 64GB Unified Memory
- 1TB SSD
- Extra: Open PCIe Slots

The Mac Pro has sacrificed upgradability for expansion. It’s an expandable Mac Pro, not an upgradable one. The storage, unified memory, CPU, and GPU are all part of an SOC (System on a Chip), rendering these components non-upgradable. Effectively, you’re purchasing a larger Mac Studio box with more internal space, but is this additional space worth the extra cost?

The Dilemma of Internal PCIe Expansion

The extra $3,000 for the Mac Pro is, in essence, an investment in the luxury of internal PCIe expansion. Yet, it could be argued that you could achieve similar results with external expansion on the Mac Studio. The Mac Pro does offer six PCI slots which open up possibilities for additional storage or other hardware upgrades such as capture cards and RAID NVMe SSDs. It also has Internal SATA ports, allowing you to load up on storage, but again, is this worth the $3,000 investment?

Internal Expansion with Mac Pro
- Six PCI slots for additional storage/hardware
- Internal SATA ports for extra storage
External Expansion with Mac Studio
- Possible similar functionality

Upgrading the Mac Pro: The Upgrade Tree

Should you decide to further upgrade your Mac Pro, it’s going to cost you:

An extra $1,000 for an additional 16 GPU cores
$1,600 to boost memory to 192GB
$2,200 for an 8TB upgrade
And if you fancy mobility, you can add wheels for an additional $400

Even with these upgrades, the maxed-out price of the Mac Pro amounts to $11,800, exactly $3,000 more than a similarly upgraded Mac Studio. Interestingly, the price of the previous Intel Mac Pro maxed out at a whopping $54,000, making this new Mac Pro seem quite a bargain in comparison.

Is Bigger Necessarily Better?

Despite its lofty price tag, the new Mac Pro appears somewhat empty. A significant portion of its internal space is unused unless populated with PCI cards. The entirety of the computer is compactly contained in the top left corner, leaving two out of the three fans to merely circulate air through an empty case.

With the old Mac Pro, you could get a terabyte and a half of memory and quad GPUs thanks to MPX modules. But now, those extra slots are conspicuously vacant. A lot of the real estate on the logic board lies unused. This, again, raises the question: Does this computer need to be so big?

Final Verdict: Is the New Mac Pro Worth It?

The unveiling of this latest Mac Pro has indeed left us with many questions and a sense of skepticism. A large part of the community was hoping for a new range of Apple silicon with mix-and-match CPUs and GPUs, or maybe even upgradable RAM or storage. But alas, these hopes seem to be in vain.

We don’t yet have a clear view of what’s on the other side of the Mac Pro. Is there upgradable RAM, similar to what we find in the Mac Studio? We can’t be certain yet. The truth remains that this new Mac Pro is essentially a larger, more expandable Mac Studio at a higher price. Is the extra $3,000 worth it for internal expansion capabilities? That’s for you to decide.