Apple reportedly engineered the most powerful processor in its history but chose to never release it. The company was developing a line of Extreme chips designed to outpace its own Ultra tier inside the flagship Mac Pro desktop. But the project was quietly scrapped before reaching the market due to high production costs and narrow consumer demand.
Details shared by Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman reveal that Apple completed work on both M2 Extreme and M3 Extreme silicon designs. These processors were intended to deliver roughly double the CPU and graphics cores of the Ultra series. Ultimately, the high financial investment required to produce the chips along with a very small target audience forced the company to cancel the project. Executives doubted that buyers would pay the massive premium required for such high performance computing.
The cancellation also sank 2 unreleased Mac Pro models codenamed J170
and J190
. The J170
desktop was meant to serve as the final Intel based machine in the lineup, despite the ongoing transition to Apple silicon. The J190
was designed to house an M3 Ultra chip and launch alongside the Mac Studio in early 2025, but it never entered mass production. This left the Mac Pro lineup without its planned generational updates.
Professional users currently rely on the Mac Studio as the main desktop workhorse. The premium version running the M3 Ultra with 32 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, 96 GB of memory, and 16 TB of storage costs $14299. It remains a specialized tool for niche developers and production houses. Apple is expected to update this professional desktop with an M5 Ultra chip this autumn to keep pace with modern computing demands.
