Another rumour (not from me) and it's SHOCKING.
Chinese forum speculate the New Mac Pro is in trashcan form factor, with one or two M2-Ultra linked by an New UltraFusion to UltraFusion fabric, if not enough bad news, only storage is discreet, 6x TB4 and 4 USB 3.1 type A like the Old trashcan "can't innovate my ass anymore" , and comment it to be released at WWDC keynote and not at late April.
Many Chinese says that's true.
If said thing is true, means two things:
Apple not interested in HPC anymore, Mac studio likely an stop Gap product irrelevant having with the new trashcan, likely along the iMac pro and the 7,1 will be gallery items.
Personally I love the trashcan, but an dual m2 ultra without options for PCIe dGPU it's just an glorified designer workstation.
Assuming is true, Said M2-Ultra² trashcan (this naming has sense now) will top at 384GB soldered RAM and 16TB storage.
Allegedly the WWDC Logo it's an clear hint, and to be honest its now seems everything wrong now has sense.
Interesting, but I still highly doubt this is true.
The 'trashcan' was a poor product on many levels and won't reiterate all, but one of those was that it was engineered around a 2 x GPU and 1 x CPU concept. That triad was the basis of the heatsink that formed the cylinder in the first place. Apple Silicon doesn't need a triad layout.
Apple made such a big deal of emphasising the expandability of 7,1, I would be shocked if they did a 180º
again and tried to argue that the 'trashcan' concept is an improvement. Besides, with a lack of eGPU support, how are they going to keep on par with the current AMD graphics options?
Not only this but, because of the nature of the M-series chips, there is even less configurability for different workflows. For instance, an audio engineer who wants all CPU would have to upgrade to the better chips
and pay for graphics cores that they don't need. They would also have no internal storage capability, so slots for AVID cards or the alike.
The way I see it, Mac mini with M-Pro chip is the trashcan replacement; Mac Studio is a stop-gap; Mac Pro will be the tower.