For those who came in late, Mac towers used to be the pride of the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple, although you would not know it from the past 15 years, where the Mac Pro has seen fewer updates than a municipal bus timetable.

Despite costing an arm and a leg, there have been only four hardware refreshes for the Mac Pro in 15 years. Buyers who waited forever for the 2023 M2 Ultra upgrade might have thought Job’s Mob had rediscovered its love for the big metal boxes.

Instead, Bloomberg hack Mark Gurman reckons the Mac Pro is “on the back burner” and that the company is aiming its next M5 Ultra effort at the Mac Studio because, apparently, towers which look like a cheese grater are too challenging to make.

Gurman said internal sources told him “Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro,” their surname said. He pointed out that the current model is marooned on the older M2 Ultra, which shows Apple does not feel the need to bother with updates even when a newer chip is sitting there.

Now Apple is questioning the Mac Pro's right to exist. After all the glory days of stuffing in drives, RAM sticks and GPUs vanished once Apple Silicon arrived. The current tower still has six PCIe slots, though none of them let you do what people actually want. You cannot add RAM or fill it with Nvidia, AMD or Chipzilla cards. Thunderbolt 5 happily transfers 120 Gbps, making fast external storage simple enough that even Job’s Mob cannot break it.

That leaves power users staring at a $7,000 Mac Pro and wondering why they should ignore the $4,000 Mac Studio, which ships with newer CPU cores, fresher GPU blocks and more memory for less money. Even in a fair fight, the Studio wins, which instead spells doom for the cheese grater.

Apple has a busy 2026 lined up across the rest of its range. Most laptops, apart from the bargain-bin 14-inch Pro, should jump to the M5 with Pro and Max flavours for the posher models. Those chips, plus an M5 Ultra, should be enough to refresh the iMac, Mac mini, and Mac Studio, and keep the faithful topped up.