Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow

Summary

Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro – but it's just the first of the tower computers to go. The rest will follow soon. Fruit-sniffers extraordaire 9-to-5 Mac got the news yesterday, complete with official confirmation from Apple itself. It's official and it's happened, but there have been warning signs for months – in November 2025, Bloomberg's Matt Gurman said "The Mac Pro is on the back burner." The phantom fruit-flingers of Silicon Valley launched the seven-thousand-buck Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro in June 2023, with an M2 Ultra SoC. It sported seven PCIe slots – but the problem was that cash-rich customers couldn't add the sorts of expansion that normally go into a PCIe slot… to the extent that Apple publishes a page about PCIe cards you can install in your Mac Pro (2023). Notably, the machine did not support add-on GPUs: only the GPU that's integrated into the CPU complex along with the machine's RAM and primary flash storage. The machine also had no RAM expansion whatsoever. Presumably, this limited its appeal for many traditional buyers, and the machine never saw an M3 or M4 model, let alone the M5 SoC that The Register covered shortly before Bloomberg called the Arm64 cheesegrater's fate. Thus ended a line of distinctive machines, from the original G5-lookalike Xeon based Mac Pro that 20 years ago was the "fastest PC in the UK", followed in 2014 by the polarizing "Darth Vader's dustbin, and then in 2019 the original Intel-based "cheesegrater". Tracing the integration trend This machine is a high-profile example, but the trend is inexorable. This is how the rest of the industry is going to go. The path to performance is increasing integration. The original 1981 IBM PC had very little on the motherboard. A 16-bit CPU on an eight-bit bus, 16 kB of RAM, a keyboard port and cassette interface. Everything else was on expansion cards: graphics, serial and parallel ports, an optional-extra floppy disk controller. Over the 45 years since then, most of the PC's possibl...