The Mac Studio offered Apple’s customers an opportunity to enjoy the unrivaled performance from a device that was barely any larger than the Mac mini. Unfortunately, it appears that the product was only launched to hold a temporary position as it might be getting replaced by an even more powerful product, the Mac Pro.
With the launch of the Mac Pro, the Mac Studio will likely feel out of place, especially if both products feature the same hardware
Assuming that Apple kept the Mac Studio for future refreshes, it would have received the option of getting kitted out with the M2 Ultra, thereby succeeding the M1 Ultra present in the current model. However, an earlier report stated that Apple was going to ditch its most powerful SoC, the M2 Extreme, and use the M2 Ultra in the upcoming Mac Pro instead. If the same silicon is found in both machines, it will make little sense to have both of them around.
This might be why LeaksApplePro stated in his tweet below that the Mac Studio will get replaced by the Mac Pro. The drawback here would be that potential buyers will no longer have a compact chassis to keep at their desk since the Mac Pro is rumored to feature a larger casing, though it will be smaller than the current version featuring Intel’s Xeon workstation processors.
It makes sense for Apple to discontinue one product in favor of the other if they offer similar specifications, but we also have to take into account the millions the company allocated towards R&D for the Mac Studio. To invest all those funds simply to have a placeholder product may not have been the best approach, but the technology giant likely had no choice since it was rumored to be running into development problems with the Mac Pro.
The M2 Ultra is said to feature up to a 24-core CPU plus a 76-core GPU, enabling even faster computing and graphics performance compared to the M1 Ultra. Additionally, the SoC may provide support for up to 192GB of unified RAM for the Mac Pro, whereas the Mac Studio is currently limited to 128GB.
News Source: LeaksApplePro
