Enlarge / Apple’s Mac Studio desktop. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If rumors are to be believed, Apple has had to scale back its ambitions for the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. A planned performance-boosting “M2 Extreme” chip has allegedly been canceled, and some of the perks people normally associate with the Mac Pro—upgradeable RAM and graphics—likely won’t be supported because of the way Apple Silicon chips are designed.

Which leaves us with, if the most recent rumors are accurate, a high-end Mac Studio with user-accessible storage slots stuffed into the current neo-cheese-grater Mac Pro tower design.

That doesn’t leave a whole lot of space between the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro—little enough that the Mac Pro could have trouble justifying its continued existence and price premium. One possible solution, as reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman: Apple could simply skip an M2-generation refresh for the Mac Studio entirely, leaving more of a performance gap between the still-M1-based Studio models and an M2-based Mac Pro.