Mac Pro M2 Ultra 2023

In comparison to its 2019 Mac Pro predecessors, the Mac Pro M2 Ultra line looks nearly identical from the outside, but it uses a completely different internal architecture -- based on Apple Silicon rather than Intel -- and has significantly less internal expansion. For all practical purposes, the Mac Pro M2 Ultra series is a Mac Studio in a larger box with more ports, support for internal storage upgrades, PCIe slots, and a larger power supply.

This specific Mac Pro, the Mac Pro "M2 Ultra" 24-Core CPU/60-Core GPU -- features a 3.68 GHz Apple M2 Ultra processor with twenty four cores (sixteen performance cores and eight efficiency cores), a 60-core GPU, a 32-core Neural Engine, a "Media Engine" that provides hardware acceleration for video encoding and decoding, 64 GB of "unified" onboard RAM, and a 1TB SSD that officially can be upgraded later.

External connectivity options include two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the top and four Thunderbolt 4 ports on the back along with two USB-A ports, two HDMI ports, two 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports, and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. It has 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6E) and Bluetooth 5.3, too.

Internal connectivity options include one USB-A port and two Serial ATA ports too as one half length x4 PCI Express Gen 3 slot occupied by an Apple I/O card and six full-length PCI Express Gen 4 slots (two x16 slots and four x8 slots).

This long-awaited Apple Silicon Mac Pro delivered phenomenal performance thanks to the M2 Ultra chip. [35] While surpassing the Intel models in many respects, it maintained the same external appearance as the 2019 version and, crucially for pro users, retained PCIe expandability. However, the move to non-upgradable, on-board unified RAM and the lack of support for third-party GPUs sparked significant debate among traditional Mac Pro users. [35] Often described as a "larger Mac Studio with PCIe slots," its place in the lineup was a topic of varied opinions. While its raw processing power was praised, the shift in its expansion philosophy became a major point of contention.