13-Inch MacBook Pro With M2 Chip Outperforms Base Model Mac Pro Despite Costing Nearly $5,000 Less

But does it have optional $700 wheels? 🤔

It does grate cheese better though, so there's that. :p

This is normal evolution. Tick/Tock. The slowest and cheapest MacBook made today runs circles around the top tier fastest MacPro of yesteryear.

Then the new MacPro will come out and become the current trophy holder - only to be supplanted in the future by the next laptop.

This leap frog cycle of laptop and Mac Pro has been going on for decades.

why spend 5000 more when you can get the m2 MacBook Pro?

I've hardly been an ardent supporter of the 2019 Mac Pro or it's admittedly extravagant pricing - but some of these comments are just too dumb to endure.

Someone has already said it here, but it bears repeating: if you don't know why you would need a Mac Pro then you don't need a Mac Pro. (The same goes for the M1 Max/Ultra).

Good luck adding 512GB RAM, quad high-end AMD workstation-class GPUs (and yes, they will thrash the M2 on GPU-heavy tasks, especially if they're not lovingly hand-optimised for Metal and the Apple Silicon GPU) or maybe 4 specialist PCIe video/audio interface cards to that MacBook Air - or maybe fitting an internal RAID array. OK you could use an external PCIE cage but those only provide a fraction of the 64 lanes of PCIe bandwidth that the Mac Pro offered.

What's true is that the base, $6000 8 core Mac Pro (with a worse GPU than the iMac) has never made sense as a stand-alone purchase, unless you were in a very small niche that just needed those specialist PCIe cards. With that CPU and GPU, even the top-end Intel iMacs and MacBook Pros offered comparable power.

I'd wager that most serious Mac Pro customers spent at least another $6000 on internal expansions and upgrades (whether they were third party or Apple). That's the bit you can't do on an iMac or MacBook.

What's changed with M1 is that the raw CPU power of the M1 Ultra in the $4000 Mac Studio now beats even the top-end Xeon available in the Mac Pro (something like a $7k upgrade over the base MP) - but even that glosses over a few points, like, the M1 Ultra tops out at 128GB RAM while the MP can take 1.5TB (...about half of that $7k CPU upgrade is not to just get more, but to get the M-suffix version that supports up to 2TB RAM). ...and you have to very carefully pick your benchmarks for the M1 Ultra to compete with some of the high-end GPU options you can fit to the Mac Pro.

The Intel Mac Pro probably is heading for obsolescence in the long term, and we know that Apple are going to offer some sort of Apple Silicon-based replacement Real Soon Now, but the sort or enterprises that need Mac Pro-level expandability can't turn on a dime, and a lot of work needs to be done on optimising the software they use before they can switch to Apple Silicon.

Also remember that computer pricing is enormously dependent on economies of scale - and Apple sell vastly more MacBook Airs than they do Mac Pros.

Even compared to PC hardware you'd probably need to spend Mac Pro-like prices to get Xeon-W, ECC and (these two are important) 1.5TB RAM capacity and 8 PCIe slots with comparable numbers of lanes. However, that skipped over a whole class of much cheaper machines with maybe 3-4 PCIe slots, 512GB RAM capability and maybe better-value AMD procesors. My main beef with the 2019 Mac Pro was not that it was a bad machine, but there was such a huge gulf between the totally non-expandable iMac and the insanely expandable Mac Pro.

...And the Mac Pro can't handle Stage Manager!

Yeah but I bet the Mac Pro runs Windows faster :p