Apple reportedly developed two unreleased Apple Silicon processors that would have pushed Mac performance well beyond today’s Ultra chips before quietly canceling both projects. The new details offer a clearer picture of Apple’s original ambitions for the Mac Pro before the company ultimately discontinued the desktop earlier this year.
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple created both the M2 Extreme and M3 Extreme chips but abandoned them because of high production costs and limited demand for the Mac Pro.
The report suggests the canceled processors would have doubled the CPU and GPU core counts of Apple’s Ultra chips. Had they reached the market, they would have given the Mac Pro a much clearer performance advantage over the Mac Studio, addressing one of the biggest criticisms of Apple’s highest-end desktop.
Instead, Apple shipped the Mac Pro with the same M2 Ultra chip found in the Mac Studio. Aside from PCIe expansion slots and a larger enclosure, both machines delivered nearly identical performance, making it difficult for many professional users to justify the Mac Pro’s significantly higher price.
According to Gurman, Apple eventually concluded that building such large processors was not commercially viable. The combination of higher manufacturing costs and relatively low demand for the Mac Pro reportedly led the company to cancel both the M2 Extreme and M3 Extreme before they ever reached production.
The report also claims Apple experimented with additional Mac Pro hardware that never launched. One prototype, internally codenamed J170, reportedly continued using an Intel processor despite Apple’s transition to Apple Silicon. Another, known as J190, was said to pair the Mac Pro with an M3 Ultra chip and was originally expected to launch alongside the M3 Ultra Mac Studio before those plans were scrapped.
Apple officially discontinued the Mac Pro in March 2026, bringing the desktop’s two-decade history to an end. The Mac Studio has since become Apple’s flagship desktop for professional users, with refreshed models powered by M5 Ultra chips reportedly expected later this year.
While Apple has never confirmed work on an Extreme-tier processor, the latest report indicates that the company’s long-term vision for the Apple Silicon Mac Pro was considerably more ambitious than the product that ultimately shipped. Rather than becoming a class of its own, the Mac Pro finished its lifecycle sharing the same chip as the Mac Studio before disappearing from Apple’s lineup altogether.
(via Bloomberg)
