Horizon
The best new tech heading your way
1 MAC PRO M2 ULTRA
From £7,199, apple.com
If you feel like 2023’s Mac Pro looks familiar, you’d be right: it does. Apple has revived the ‘cheese grater’ case from the 2019 model (thankfully leaving 2013’s cylindrical ‘trash can’ design where it belongs) but that’s about the only similarity between the two generations.
This new Mac Pro marks the end of Apple’s years-long transition from Intel-based processing to Apple Silicon, swapping the Xeon W for its own brand new M2 Ultra package. The Ultra bridges two M2 Max chips together to create performance that should be three times as fast as the most fully loaded of its predecessors – at least according to the rough kind of estimate one can make when comparing Intel’s oranges to Apple’s, er, apples.
The price still stings; the number above is indicative of the base model, which manages to be over £2,000 more expensive than the bog-standard Intel version. But that looks like a bargain up against the top-end Xeon model it’s apparently comparable to, an absurd beast that came in somewhere around £40,000.
The money’s moot anyway. Unless you’re a creative professional, it’s highly unlikely you’ll make the investment in a Mac Pro M2 Ultra, particularly considering the attractiveness and more affordable price of the new Mac Studio, overleaf. But if you need one, you need one: we very much doubt its blistering processor speed, coupled with what will almost certainly be far more quiet cooling, will disappoint in any way.
CHIPS CHALLENGE
The M2 Ultra is 20% faster than the M1 Ultra, it can support up to 192GB RAM, and its doubleheader design (it’s basically two chips) gives it twice the memory bandwidth of the M2 Max. It’s mad.