Apple adjusts Mac Pro pricing, but you still shouldn’t buy it

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You get better specs at each price level, but it’s still three-year-old hardware

by James Vincent  Apr 4, 2017, 

Apple has issued a mea culpa over the Mac Pro, telling a number of publications that it’s “sorry” there was a “pause in upgrades and updates” for the device — introduced in 2013 and stagnant ever since. The company says a new Mac Pro with an all-new design is coming, but in the meantime, it’s switched up pricing and components of existing models to give customers a slightly better deal.

The design of the Pro remains unchanged, but the new entry-level $2,999 model now comes with a six-core Xeon Processor (the old model had a four-core chip), dual Fire Pro D500 GPUs (instead of D300s), and 16GB of RAM. The high-end $3,999 Mac Pro ups its processor to an eight-core model, and bumps those D500 GPUs to D700s.

As far as upgrades go, it’s minimal. All Apple has done is drop the old high-end models into lower price brackets, and at the end of the day, this is still three-year-old hardware. Plus, it’s difficult to say who will be tempted to buy the Pro, especially with new models coming in 12 months’ time. But, whatever happens next, it’s likely we’ve seen the end of the Mac Pro in its incarnation as shiny black waste bin. As Apple exec Phil Schiller told BuzzFeed: “We are completely rethinking the Mac Pro.