Mark Gurman has commented on the state of the Mac Studio, which Apple introduced 11 months ago. While the mini-PC debuted with Apple's most powerful chipsets, the company has since pivoted to the M2 series with the M2 Pro and M2 Max. Theoretically, the M2 Max and rumoured M2 Ultra should be drop-in replacements for their M1-based predecessors.
However, Gurman asserts that Apple will hold off from upgrading the Mac Studio at all, with no second-generation model in sight. Instead, Apple will overlook the Mac Studio for the Mac Pro, the company's last device to transition from Intel to in-house processors. Purportedly, there would be little to distinguish the Mac Studio from an Apple silicon-based Mac Pro, with the latter rumoured to lack expandable memory or discrete GPU options.
Moreover, production issues are thought to have been the downfall of the M2 Extreme, which was alleged to contain 48 CPU cores and 152 GPU cores with support for 384 GB of unified memory. As it stands, the Mac Pro is expected to top out at the M2 Ultra, a 24 CPU-core and 76 GPU-core part. In short, Apple will seek to make the Mac Pro more attractive by not upgrading the Mac Studio. Currently, Gurman believes that Apple will either discontinue the Mac Studio after a single generation or will wait as far as the Apple M4 series before releasing second-generation models.
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