TL;DR: Not really.
While perhaps not a popular opinion, simply by considering the new Mac Pro as a Mac Studio for Pros, they could release what is effectively an expandable Mac Studio.
The
Mac Studio is the allrounder: fits almost into any area of computer work: development, publishing, design, photography, video and many areas of 3D too.
You expand with peripherals, most notably hard drive space if you need lots of cheap storage.
The
Mac Pro is the tweakable Pro machine: same as Mac Studio, but you can internalise custom needs like various interfaces and hard drive space, which makes it more flexible, tidier and easier to move. The
original idea was clearly to offer an additional (doubling) of performance to set it apart from the Mac Studio in terms of performance, but this seems to have been scrapped. At least for now.
I think it's fair to say that not offering the M2 Extreme, thus making the Mac Pro identical in performance to the Mac Studio is a bit of a bummer for bragging rights, but at the end of the day we need to look at usability. Also, don't be surprised if Apple takes advantage of better cooling in the Mac Pro and allow the M2 Ultra Mac Pro version to run slightly faster to allow it to outperform the Mac Studio on paper (or in benchmarks). Not meaningfully of course,
unless you just want "the fastest Mac".
These Mac Pros will always be a balancing act from Apple's perspective. With the Intel machines I think they tried to cater to those who need power. Grunt. A lot of you who were stuck with the 4.1/5.1 were disappointed by the high price.
If Apple goes along with the 'expandable Mac Studio concept' there will likely be some disappointment in the "I want as much power as possible" camp. At the same time, there is no reason why these machines would be prohibitively expensive for Old Gen Mac Pro users who finally can switch over. And you definitely should. Apple would most likely open up the "affordable end" to a much larger crowd than they would disappoint at the "top end".
If you are currently running a pimped Mac Pro 5.1, you will be blown away by a Mac Pro M2 Ultra.
The Problem: Apple's current problem was identified shortly after the M1 launch, once we saw how they planned to expand performance. They opted to take a core base unit design and just double, or quadruple that unit. That core Apple Silicon is great for all-around performance, but when you look at computing, the higher up you go in the "I want more Grunt" envelope, the more the expectation becomes that the compute needs are handled on the GPU.
While the base Apple Silicon unit is great for entry level stuff, the more you double it, the more overpowered it becomes on the CPU side and underpowered it becomes on the GPU side.
Or perhaps better: as you expand GPU performance, you add a lot of unwanted complexity and cost due to the CPU side that gets dragged along.
Ironically, I remember reading/hearing from... hmm, I think it was Federighi, saying the standard dual GPU of the Trashcan Mac Pro was a mistake. They had expected the GPU to take over the compute role, but now they have concluded that never panned out and was a mistake.
I found this to be a very odd conclusion. They were in fact right back then, they just had the wrong GPUs. The industry had moved to CUDA, later Optix, and Apple were stuck with underperforming AMD chips and the famous Thermal Corner.
To be honest, I think it's kind of awkward to keep expanding parallell CPU power, when all you want is GPU power. I think it's reasonable to stop at Ultra for these designs, but that leaves me wanting for an expansion card like the Afterburner, but for Raytracing. I'm intentionally not using the term 'Apple GPU' even though there would be a lot of overlap. In a Mac Pro, I think a pure compute cards is more attractive than a gaming video card. I also think a non-realtime parallell compute card is easier to integrate with Apple's new hardware/compute/memory design.
At this point in time, Apple has no practical way to offer Nvidia level compute performance. I'm hoping for innovation in the near future here.*
Guesstimate: Apple once again rethinks Mac Pro (but honestly, this should be true for any generation) and makes it available to a much larger crowd by lowering costs of basic configurations, while harmonising every Mac to use Apple Silicon. This decision benefits more people than it hurts.
*= I'm not interested in comparing benchmark numbers or 'on paper performance' comparing TeraFlops and such. The only thing that matters is the net result from hardware and software working together.
