Mac Pro With M2 Ultra Serves Up Big Expandability At A Big Price

At its annual developer's conference, Apple finally completed its transition to Apple silicon with the introduction of a new Mac Pro. The "cheesegrater" design is here to stay, but its Intel chip has been swapped in favor of a beastly M2 Ultra silicon, the most powerful processor that Apple has to offer at the moment.

The M2 Ultra packs 24 CPU cores and a massive graphics engine that comes armed with 76 GPU cores, while also doubling the memory and storage capacity. Apple claims the updated Mac Pro can manage up to 22 ProRes videos at 8K resolution simultaneously.

3D video transcoding performance is 3x quicker, and it can handle 24 video encoding streams at 4K resolution. If you really need all the firepower that Apple has to offer, you can spend on a configuration with 192GB RAM with 800Gbps bandwidth. Apple is touting up to 7x faster performance than the most recent Intel-based Mac Pro.

At WWDC 2023, Apple talked extensively about the storage expansion versatility of the new Mac Pro. It offers seven PCIe expansion slots, with six of them supporting the PCIe Gen 4 standard that is twice as faster. The I/O situation is handled by a total of eight Thunderbolt 4 bolts — two on the top and six at the back.

There's also a trio of USB Type-A ports, a pair of high-bandwidth HDMI ports that allow up to 8K video streams, and a pair of Ethernet ports with a peak 10Gbps data throughput. You can hook up to six Pro Display XDR monitors to the new Mac Pro, if you desire that many screens on your workstation for some reason.

The Mac Pro starts at $6,999 for the tower setup, but if you want the rack-mounted format, you will have to cough up $7,499 at the bare minimum. A student discount brings the asking price of Apple's updated Mac Pro to $6,599.