M2 Ultra Mac Studio review: Who needs a Mac Pro, anyway?

Why not consider a Mac Pro?

On that topic, the appearance of an actual Apple Silicon Mac Pro has done nothing to convince me that the Mac Pro should continue to exist.

It's not that there isn't a need or demand for high-end, modular, upgradeable desktop computers in 2023. It's that the Apple Silicon Mac Pro just barely manages to fit that description, and an identically specced Mac Studio costs $3,000 less and is considerably smaller.

Here's a refresher for those who don't follow pre-release Mac rumors regularly: Supposedly, the Apple Silicon Mac Pro was supposed to use an even more powerful version of the M2, one that stuck a pair of M2 Ultras together just like the Ultra sticks a pair of M2 Maxes together. The extra power would be a key selling point, especially compared to the Mac Studio.

At some point, those plans were scrapped. (At one point, it was also suggested that Apple might skip an M2 update for the Studio so that the Pro could have the faster chips; if this artificial segmentation gambit was ever actually floated internally, I'm glad someone shot it down). So the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro is the fastest Mac that has ever existed, as a new Mac Pro tower should be. But it's now tied for that distinction with a second Mac that's much, much smaller and $3,000 cheaper.

Compounding this problem, the new Mac Pro can no longer take advantage of dedicated external GPUs and upgradeable memory because of how Apple Silicon chips are built. The memory and GPU are all part of the M2 package, and that integrated unified pool of memory that can be shared by the CPU and GPU is part of Apple Silicon's appeal for some people. The chips just aren't built for modularity or expandability. Hector Martin of the Asahi Linux team, one of the people outside Apple who probably has the most low-level familiarity with Apple's chips, even points out that Apple has needed to fudge the Mac Pro's PCI Express slots a bit since the M2 Ultra doesn't have enough PCIe lanes to give every slot its full bandwidth at the same time.

All of this leaves the Mac Pro in an awkward spot. The 2019 tower could be upgraded by end users to use up to 1.5TB of RAM; the new one tops out at the same 192GB as the Studio (it's hard for even the most advanced home users to imagine needing more, but longevity and future-proofness was once a selling point of the Mac Pro). The 2019 tower can use GPUs that were made after 2019 thanks to new AMD graphics drivers in newer versions of macOS; the new one will use the same Apple GPU for its entire working life. It might look like an old-fashioned Mac Pro tower on the outside, but it has many of the same limitations as the decade-old "trash can" Mac Pro.

That leaves the Mac Pro with a narrower-than-ever potential audience: people who require macOS for high-end work and don’t care about RAM or GPU upgradeability but who do need multiple internal PCI Express expansion slots for other non-GPU, non-Afterburner cards. I'm not saying there's no demand for that kind of a machine. But the Mac Pro feels like an unsatisfying compromise between the desire for an expandable computer and the realities of Apple Silicon.

Performance and power use

Apple's M2 Ultra combines 16 high-performance CPU cores with eight efficiency cores for a total of 24, twice as many as the M2 Pro or M2 Max. The GPU also includes either 60 or 72 cores, depending on the configuration you buy, plus a 32-core Neural Engine for accelerating some AI and machine-learning workloads.

We don't have an M2 Max version of the Studio to compare to the M2 Ultra this time around, but based on the numbers we have from a 16-inch MacBook Pro, the Ultra's multi-core CPU performance is between 70 and 90 percent faster, depending on the test, while its 3DMark graphics performance is more than twice as fast. This may be an imperfect comparison if the M2 Max can run a bit faster in a Studio desktop than it can in a more thermally constrained laptop.