"2 year transition promise" and "Mac Pro is for another day" statement at the Mac Studio announcement –> First gen Asi Mac Pro will be announced this year.
There was never a "promise" - it was "
Apple plans to ship the first Mac with Apple silicon by the end of the year and complete the transition in about two years" - subsequent events have given Apple plenty of excuses to change that plan (pray that they do not change it further...). "Mac Pro is for another day" promises even less and just sounds like "kicking the can (of worms) down the road."
That said, if Apple doesn't say something about the Mac Pro at/before WWDC then I'm not sure who is going to be hanging around to buy one - its not going to be a casual purchase and "serious callers" need some sort of certainty so that they can plan and budget for future projects, know that they can replace broken equipment or kit out new staff, plus any company on a 3-4 year lease cycle, or claiming equipment against tax, will be coming up on their "accounting window" for getting new kit. Apple now has a shameful track record in launching new "pro" Macs that turn out to be one-and-done products and then heading off on a different tangent with the replacement.
and a Mac Pro with compute modules is a perfect tool for high-end AR-VR content creation.
Maybe, but ultimately, this new AR content has to be
delivered by something about the size of an iPhone supported by a mobile internet connection, so the bulk of development could be self-hosted on the delivery device (that has been true of personal computers for
decades - pretty much since floppy drives became affordable). Of course, there are exceptions, like pre-rendering content or training ML systems which has been one target market for Mac Pro - but, going forward, it makes a lot more sense to do that using shared hardware in the cloud
especially if (a) that is where your raw data lives (b) if you are working on large a development team, either scattered around a building or even working remotely, so all the data and code needs to be shared (the cloud compute server almost certainly has faster access to the data server than your desktop does).
I'd suggest that
in 2023 a "perfect tool" for high-end AR-VR content creation would be a MacBook Air, an AR headset, a fast internet connection and an account with an Apple developer cloud service that can supply whatever computing horsepower you need "on demand"
and handles all the DevOps/Continuous Integration stuff that enables you to work with a team of developers all working remotely.
(Apple gave up eating their own dog food for their online services backend when they canned the XServe and MacOS Server - and while the M-series puts them way ahead of the game for ARM-based personal computers, Ampere, AWS etc. probably have the jump on them for server-class/high-density computing hardware).
I think there's a lot of people in this thread asking for Henry Ford's (probably apocryphal) "faster horses" - and that's a reasonable request if you have an existing, paying workflow that can't turn on a dime (which is why Apple may have to come up with a Mac Pro replacement anyway) - but I'm not sure its a growth area and certainly not the way forward for a shiny new AR platform. Eschewing the "faster horses" route is one thing Apple
have been fairly consistent about.
