MP All Models Is the Mac Pro still relevant in 2025

[theluggage]

The way you describe it makes me realise this is part of why I am not keen on the latest mac hardware.

Yeah. If you want a product roadmap to help you plan a 5-year project that might not even start until 2027, Apple have repeatedly proved that they're not for you. We're discussing lots of technical pros and cons of a potential Mac Pro replacement here, but the elephant in the room here is that the last 4 Mac Pros (2019, iMac Pro, Trashcan, 2010) have been abandonware and were replaced with products that assumed major workflow changes... and we're already playing guessing games as to whether #5 is going the same way.

Technical merits aside, the sort of serious-callers-only markets that Apple are targetting with the Mac Pro and even Studio Ultra are going to be looking for more stability than Apple - who tend to think in terms of consumer products - have provided in the past.

 

[F1Mac]

For my own personal use, my 2009 MacPro running Sonoma with three video cards and six drives says 'Yes', it's still relevant. Just did some editing of InDesign files in ID CC24 this morning. Photoshop and Illustrator CC25 are also installed.

How did you manage to install Photoshop 2025 on a 2009 MP? Because if there's a secret way the bypass the AVX2 requirement I'd like to know too ☺️

...As for the original question, the landscape has changed so much since the Mac Pro was introduced. I think the Mac Pro has become irrelevant for a large majority of people who needed one a few years back. Of course that doesn't mean there is no more need for it, but it's probably a very tiny one. I love my 6,1 even to this day, I can do everything I need with it (music), I can run the latest OS thanks to OCLP. At some point in the future I will get a new Mac, and I'm sure it won't be a Mac Pro. So for me and I guess many people the answer is no, it's not relevant in 2025. A few years years ago it was. Is it still reasonable (i.e profitable) for Apple to keep developing this computer? I like to think the answer might be yes but I doubt it.

 

[iPadified]

The danger would be if a major third-party "pro" app stopped supporting the Mac because there was no flagship Mac Pro to target, then the lower-end Macs would lose it, too.

They never started in some fields, like engineering (CAD, simulation) and other sciences. 3D modelling (Blender etc) is PC first as well regarding software. The lacking NVIDIA support is likely the reason.

"you can do anything on a Studio / Macbook" proclamations, as if they have any clue what they're talking about.

I did not say that. I said that Apple cannot care for very small number of people. The Mac Pro business is simply too small for that.

So having a Mac Pro is required to be part of the discussion? I buy the computer I need for a task and do not care about the label or the operating system. For workstations I typically use HP or Dell with whatever is needed (software is missing on Apple (specialised STEM software)). Sometimes I even use a gaming setups to save money when that is appropriate (our latest sequencing machine that needed NVIDIA compute) or 5 year old laptops for running lab equipment. An M1 Pro MBP sits on my desktop so I do not need to see Windows everyday and iPad for teaching situations (the pencil is perfect for my type of teaching). If I needed a something outside the mainstream, Apple would be the last place I would look.

Classical workstation are used less and less and as theluggage observed, for each generation of laptops and smaller desktops, few and fewer needs a classical workstation. Apple is slowly making the Mac Pro irrelevant as a business case because 1) no NVIDIA support (or AMD), 2) a whole range of (STEM) software simply does not exist.

 

[theluggage]

The ONLY problem Apple Books had, the reason they didn't do better against Kindle, was being fettered to the corpse that was having to buy Apple hardware to access the store or use the app. They literally had the lesson of history right there - iTunes and iPod on Windows

Except, iTunes sold iPods (in vast numbers, at premium prices) - even to Windows users. If tech at the time had allowed them to run the iTunes store on an iPod, would we have seen iTunes for Windows? Plus, at the time, iTunes was about the only legal music download service in the game - even the big music stores were late to the game in selling downloads.

I think the iTunes->Music switch marked the point at which Apple started thinking about services and media sales as an end in themselves rather than as a way to sell hardware. I'm not defending the attendant encrudification of the service - but that's the reason.

Amazon Kindle started out as an expensive device but by the time iBooks came along the price was plummeting, because Amazon were making their money from book sales - and they had a head start because people already bought their physical books from Amazon (...and got targetted ads from Amazon).

iTunes succeeded in breaking into a new market because Apple got in first with an attractive hardware/software tie-in. With eBooks Amazon got there first with the kindle and already had a dominant position in online book sales.

Plus, although iBooks was great for interactive textbooks, the eInk-based kindle blew it away for reading novels etc: It had a daylight-readable screen, battery life measured in weeks rather than hours and (before everybody and their dog had mobile broadband and/or the phrase "what's the WiFi password" replaced "Hello, how are you?") a free mobile data service that let you buy books on-device. Even with an iPad and smartphone, I still use a kindle for most leisure reading - for which the bells and whistles of iBooks are mostly irrelevant and/or wouldn't work on an eInk screen.

I think Apple bet the farm on the school textbook market (where the interactive aspect would be a benefit) again as part of the drive to get iPad into education. Which has been partly successful but hit a lot of pushback - partly because, outside of a few niches where a touchscreen and stylus is useful, a "proper" laptop or chromebook is more versatile. About 10 years ago there was a big drive with a large educational publisher to produce an iPad-centric English and Math curriculum - which turned into a bit of an omnishambles throigh a mixture of political and business pushback & software existence failure.

that has little, if anything realistically to do with Apple being found guilty of masterminding a criminal conspiracy in the US District Court, whose only actual consequence was to require Apple to obey the law.

That sort of thing can still poison a project politically, even if there's no practical reason why it should.

 

[eyoungren]

How did you manage to install Photoshop 2025 on a 2009 MP? Because if there's a secret way the bypass the AVX2 requirement I'd like to know too ☺️

I did that with the benefit of a second Mac. My work issued M2 has those apps installed. I simply copied them over from the M2 into the Applications folder. I don't know if it's necessary or not, but I did have Creative Cloud off when I did this.

But you also need to take care of the support files. Those are in the User Library folder, Application Support, Adobe, the version of the program. You copy those to the same place on the computer you want the install to be on. And same for User Library folder, Preferences, Adobe X (where X is the name of the application your're wanting).

Then you just open the apps.

Adobe Creative Cloud will show that they are installed but won't generally allow you to update. Both Illustrator and Photoshop work fine for me, I've not hit any issues (yet) where the AVX2 requirements caused them to crash or anything. But ID CC25 simply won't start.

Adobe, like Apple, tends to be stingy with the requirements. They will just blanket label everything as not working if you don't have X. But my experience with CS4, led me not to trust that. The master installer of CS4 demands an Intel Mac. But if you use the individual installers, you can get the big three installed on a PowerPC Mac - and several of the others.

So, that's why I tried this approach. If it failed, no harm no foul. But two of the three apps worked.

PS. I do not advocate piracy. I am paying for my subscription, so if I had an M series Mac I would legitimately be able to run the apps I copied over. I am legitimately able to run them now as Adobe Creative Cloud does not reject them for my license. It's just the Creative Cloud app itself will not let me install them.

 

[Jethro!]

It’s not going to happen. :-(

It would if people demanded it.
Problem is enough people said, "Whatever, ok" and kept buying when Apple went all-in on non-upgradable, disposable computers, and now Apple thinks that's the acceptable business model.

 

[Happy_John]

It would if people demanded it.
Problem is enough people said, "Whatever, ok" and kept buying when Apple went all-in on non-upgradable, disposable computers, and now Apple thinks that's the acceptable business model.

But the general consensus from users, reviews and pundits is that moving way from Intel to Apple Silicon has been amigo improvement for the end user.

They're not going to buy CPUs from Intel anytime soon.

 

[m1maverick]

3) ML folks who need large memory

The M3 Studio Ultra offers more memory (512GB) than the 2023 Mac Pro (192GB). Prior to the release of the M3 Studio Ultra the M2 Studio Ultra offered the same capacity (192GB) as the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro used to represent the system with the highest capacity for memory. Unfortunately that is not the case today.

 

[m1maverick]

I did not say that. I said that Apple cannot care for very small number of people. The Mac Pro business is simply too small for that.

Is that because the market is not there? Or is it because a lot of the market left / are leaving because Apple doesn't seem to care about them? It's my opinion it's the latter.

Apple has neutered the Mac Pro to the point where only a tiny market for it exists. The Mac Pro is essentially a $3K more expensive Mac Studio Ultra because Apple essentially made it a Studio Ultra. Even worse the Studio Ultra has more processing / memory capability than the current Mac Pro. If you need CPU / GPU / memory capacity the less expensive Studio makes a lot more sense than the Mac Pro.

 

[poematik13]

They need to pivot it to being a budget AI server for small to medium size businesses that want a private local LLM in their own office. Basically bring back Xserve but with 768GB VRAM and 80 core GPU, etc.

For other uses (content creation, local data server, CAD and engineering, etc) the mac mini, studio, and macbook pro are perfect already.

 

[theluggage]

They need to pivot it to being a budget AI server for small to medium size businesses that want a private local LLM in their own office.

The Studio Ultra is as well-suited to that as anything else with a current Apple Silicon processor (and is already a processor generation ahead of the Mac Pro, which supports more RAM). It's not going to be "budget" in any sense until Apple give up their 4x-over-retail markup for RAM and storage.

 

[OS6-OSX]

Apple Books had plenty of traction, and was a vibrant platform providing the best reading experience, by a wide margin, on Apple devices. The problem was that it was managed by idiots. It's an absolute textbook case of the sort of self-sabotage that is at the core of Apple's DNA.

Let's not even go down the self-sabotage lane. I spent 21 years on this couch talking to a guy wearing a gotee and speaking with a German accent! We spoke about
1. Why Aperture could not compete with Lightroom?
2. Why FinalTouch (Color) could not compete with DaVinci?
3. Why Shake could not compete with Nuke? I will only speak on #3.
a. Shake was developed by a company in Santa Monica called Nothing's Real
b. All they needed was money to continue developing the sections of the software that were lacking
c. Apple bought them and there was a buzz in the "Shake" forums!
d. The new app was to be named Phenomenom. We all new it would be a bust when Apple mentioned their app Motion. Motion is linear while Shake is node based.
e. The next thing you knew the majority of the NR went to The Foundry. The makers of Nuke!
f. ILM and a couple of other companies (LUMA) developed their own 3D tools to make that function of Shake work for them.

 

[poematik13]

The Studio Ultra is as well-suited to that as anything else with a current Apple Silicon processor (and is already a processor generation ahead of the Mac Pro, which supports more RAM). It's not going to be "budget" in any sense until Apple give up their 4x-over-retail markup for RAM and storage.

A 512GB VRAM Studio is actually a bargain for AI work, theyre only 8500 when an equivalent nvidia GPU is that much just for the card not including the rest of the PC

 

[iPadified]

Is that because the market is not there? Or is it because a lot of the market left / are leaving because Apple doesn't seem to care about them? It's my opinion it's the latter.

Apple has neutered the Mac Pro to the point where only a tiny market for it exists. The Mac Pro is essentially a $3K more expensive Mac Studio Ultra because Apple essentially made it a Studio Ultra. Even worse the Studio Ultra has more processing / memory capability than the current Mac Pro. If you need CPU / GPU / memory capacity the less expensive Studio makes a lot more sense than the Mac Pro.

The market was never there. Apple always cared for the video and music market. MP2013 was a video editor, same with iMacPro and the rest. To succeed as workstation you need to cater for corporate and there Apple is weak. Mac Pro was essentially killed by lack of professional apps. Just video and music is too small market and with good SoCs having hardware accelerator you come along way with a MBP and Mac Studio.

 

[Madonepro]

Is the Mac Studio, effectively the Mac Pro? Mac Pro's were for graphic designers, videographers etc, who work (usually) in a Studio. Apple may introduce a Mac Studio Pro, which has the expandable considerations needed for 'pro users', but honestly these days, what are those.

 

[theluggage]

To succeed as workstation you need to cater for corporate and there Apple is weak.

Apple has ensured that by the complete lack of continuity in the Mac Pro line since 2012 - however, there's a chicken and egg question there: did that happen because Apple was incompetent, or was it because they realised it was a shrinking market (even in the Windows/PC sector) anyway?

In a market where sheer computing horsepower is king, the ability to bolt together custom systems from commodity hardware and still have a huge software base is going to win - a marginally nicer UI, slick iDevice integration and great battery life isn't going to cut it there. Apple is going to be dependent on users who are somehow locked into a MacOS workflow, who are going to drift away one by one as they finally make the break and migrate to the cheap hardware.

Is the Mac Studio, effectively the Mac Pro?

What is a Mac Pro?
No, Apple haven't made a "true" Mac Pro - a tower system that took over where the iMac & Mini left off - since 2012
No, the 2019 Mac Pro was the only "true" Mac Pro
The 2019 Mac Pro wasn't a true Mac Pro - it was some sort of "Mac Ultra Extreme" that cost 5 digit dollars for any configuration that made sense. The true Mac Pros were the Trashcan, the iMac Pro and the i7 Mini.
The Mac Studio is the spiritual successor to the Trashcan Mac Pro.
The Mac Studio is just the Mac Mini Pro...
The 2023 "Mac Pro" is really the "Studio Ultra PCIe Edition".
No, a Mac Pro has to have expandable internal storage and PCIe.
No, a Mac Pro has to have NVIDIA GPUs
No, a Mac Pro has to have <my personal favourite feature>
No, a Mac Pro has to have "Mac Pro" written on the box.
...and so on, until you get to:
No, the Studio has seen two major updates in that last 3 years, it can't possibly be a Mac Pro until it's been neglected for 5-6 years...

What I would say is that if you pretend the 2019 MP didn't exist, the Mac Studio is the obvious successor to the Trashcan and the iMac Pro, which is clearly the way some at Apple saw the Mac Pro evolving.

'pro users', but honestly these days, what are those.

"Pro" users need their machines for paid work & can justify paying a bit more. That's all.
"Pro" products are slightly more powerful than the products that don't say "pro". That's all.

A Pro user will use a Walmart M1 MacBook Air if it gets the job done.

I can probably buy "pro" toothpaste and shampoo in the supermarket. The makers are *not* targeting those at dentists and hairdressers.

 

[Madonepro]

No, the Studio has seen two major updates in that last 3 years, it can't possibly be a Mac Pro until it's been neglected for 5-6 years...

"Pro" users need their machines for paid work & can justify paying a bit more. That's all

Mac Pro often goes without being updated for many years, and all the so called features of the Mac Pro, are arbitrary. Not sure why you seem to be the authority on what constitutes a requirement for a Mac Pro. From the beginning, it was simply a powerful machine, that had the inputs for pro users, defined then as Graphic Designers and Photographers.

Your 'That's all' all comment, is so dismissive of others, and is very off putting, for people in here, trying to have a discussion/debate.

 

[theluggage]

Mac Pro often goes without being updated for many years

I think you failed to spot the invisible "sarcasm" tag on that comment.

and all the so called features of the Mac Pro, are arbitrary

Yes, that's my point - and why I listed a string of deliberately contradictory definitions of what a "Mac Pro" was. So there's no point debating what "is" or "isn't" a Mac Pro.

From the beginning, it was simply a powerful machine, that had the inputs for pro users, defined then as Graphic Designers and Photographers.

Defined by who?

There was nothing about the original Mac Pro that was specific to "graphic designers and photographers" with the possible exception of Mac OS itself - it was a fairly powerful, general-purpose machine suitable for software development, number-crunching, video, audio etc. at a time when a PCIe tower was the ubiquitous "workhorse" of the PC world. The main hardware distinction from cheaper PC towers was that it used Xeon processors and ECC RAM which (reputedly) provide extra stability for "pro" users where "pro user" means "any user for whom time is money and doesn't want to re-run their 4-hour number crunching task because of a rare memory error". It was actually, originally, a pretty good deal for a dual Xeon system, making it "acceptable overkill" for anybody who just wanted more grunt than the iMacs of the day and/or internal expansion. Including video editors and audio producers (missing from your pro user definitiion) - who also often needed PCIe slots for specialist A/V interface/accelerator cards.

The trashcan was more of a FCPx video editing "appliance" that relied on a specific computing model (OpenCL with dual medium-sized GPUs) and only delivered its best when running software optimised for that setup. It is generally regarded as a mistake. An updated "classic" Mac Pro would have been able to do anything a Trashcan could do or run a single big GPU - plus it lacked PCIe slots for the specialist audio and video interfaces, while not being easily rack-mountable alongside thunderbolt/firewire a/v boxes or storage.

The iMac Pro (probably intended as the Trashcan replacement, whatever it was called) was a great machine if you re-defined "pro users" as "people who need a non-expandable workstation-class processor and GPU permanently attached to a 5k prosumer 27" display".

The 2019 Mac Pro more than doubled the entry price of a Mac Pro, immediately throwing one chance of users under a bus. It was pitched way over the heads of "graphic artists and photographers" unless they needed 1.5TB or RAM and $$$$$ worth of multple high-end GPUs -

Your 'That's all' all comment, is so dismissive of others, and is very off putting, for people in here, trying to have a discussion/debate.

Except, like it or not, it is all when it comes to what the "Mac Pro" name or "pro users" means. Doesn't take any great wisdom to see that.

The reality is that the Mac Studio couldn't be called the "Mac Pro" because when Apple launched it the 2019 "Mac Pro" was still a current product, and "Studio" is just a name dreamed up by marketing (I guess "Mac YouTubersBedroom" or "Mac Ive-Got-Lots-of-Money-and-Bought-This-to-Play-Minecraft" - both profitable markets for Apple - didn't pass the focus group).

There's a good debate going on here about the whys and wherefores of a high-end Mac workstation - but trying to read significance into model names or what constitutes a "pro user" (most people's definition: "people with the same workflow as me") is angels-on-a-pinhead stuff.

 

[Tyler O'Bannon]

AFAIK the only thing the Mac Pro adds is the expandability for certain cards that people in film and music might need. That’s about it 🤷🏻‍♂️ (not to mention it’s M2 ATM)

 

[Allen_Wentz]

Let's not even go down the self-sabotage lane. I spent 21 years on this couch talking to a guy wearing a gotee and speaking with a German accent! We spoke about
1. Why Aperture could not compete with Lightroom?
2. Why FinalTouch (Color) could not compete with DaVinci?
3. Why Shake could not compete with Nuke? I will only speak on #3.
a. Shake was developed by a company in Santa Monica called Nothing's Real
b. All they needed was money to continue developing the sections of the software that were lacking
c. Apple bought them and there was a buzz in the "Shake" forums!
d. The new app was to be named Phenomenom. We all new it would be a bust when Apple mentioned their app Motion. Motion is linear while Shake is node based.
e. The next thing you knew the majority of the NR went to The Foundry. The makers of Nuke!
f. ILM and a couple of other companies (LUMA) developed their own 3D tools to make that function of Shake work for them.
View attachment 2529839

1. Aperture competed just fine with Lightroom.