The rackmount Mac Pro is for A/V studios, not datacenters.

Don't forget CI/CD farms for iOS builds, although I think it's much more cost effective to just make Minis or Studios work, despite their nonstandard formfactor

Google and Facebook have vast fleets of Minis in custom chassis for this purpose.

I genuinely forgot the Mac Pro still exists. It’s been so long since I even saw one.

And I’ve had every previous Mac tower design since 1999: G4, G5, the excellent dual Xeon, the horrible black trash can… But Apple Silicon delivers so much punch in the Studio form factor, the old school Pro has become very niche.

Edit - looks like the new M3 Ultra is only available in Mac Studio anyway? So the existence of the Pro is moot here.

never understood the hate on the trash can. Isn't the mac studio basically the same idea as the trash can but even less upgradeable?

The Mac Studio hit a sweet spot in 2023 that the trash can Mac Pro couldn't ten years earlier. It's mostly thanks to the high integration of Apple Silicon and improved device availability and speed of Thunderbolt.

The 2013 Mac Pro was stuck forever with its original choice of Intel CPU and AMD GPU. And it was unfortunately prone to overheating due to these same components.

The trash can also suffered from hitting the market right around when the industry gave up on making dual-GPU work.

Yep. It was designed for CPU grunt, and came out right when people swapped to wanting tons of GPU grunt.

The cooling solution wasn’t designed for huge GPUs. So it couldn’t really be upgraded in ways most people wanted.

Folks that want to keep the customisation aspect of Mac Pro hardly see that.

In fact a very famous podcaster is still holding out to his.

The Studio also hits a sweet spot for home users like me that want tons of IO and no built in input devices.

Outside of extremely niche use cases, who is racking apple products in 2025?

There's MacMiniVault (nee MacMiniColo) https://www.macminivault.com/

Not sure if they count as niche or not.

Every provider who offers MacOS in the cloud.

So MacOS is still not allowed to be virtualized per the EULA? Wow if that's true...

MacOS is permitted to be virtualized... as long as the host is a Mac. :)

AWS

github for their macos runners (pretty sure theyre m1 minis)