M4 Extreme Mac Pro
The Mac Pro has been updated with the new M4 Extreme—the most extreme chip for the most extreme workloads.
Happy April Fools' Day! My fourth annual April Fools' Day was to turn the Mac Pro into the ultimate Pro workstation. With a gorgeous Space Black finish and a jaw-dropping new M4 Extreme chip, the Mac Pro rises to become, far and away, the most powerful and capable Mac ever developed.
For years, the Mac Pro has been maligned and mocked. It's Apple's most expensive Mac, but it has routinely been ignored for years, appearing as an afterthought in Apple's lineup. It was largely forgotten after its release in 2013, only to be revived in 2019, and then lapped less than a year later by the release of Apple Silicon. It can't catch a break.
Last updated in 2023 alongside the Mac Studio with the M2 Ultra chip, the $6999 Mac Pro didn't even get the M3 Ultra when Apple updated the Mac Studio earlier in March. That begs the question: What's next for the Mac Pro, and will the next update (if there is one) give it features or a chip that truly helps it stand apart from the rest of the Mac lineup?
Can’t deny, a Mac Pro in Space Black looks gorgeous.
And that is where my April Fools' Day prank comes in. I don't have the skills to render or create a new-looking design, so I opted for the existing Mac Pro Chassis and gave it a Space Black anodized finish.
Introducing the M4 Extreme.
Next was to dream big about what sort of chip Apple would put into a computer with that much thermal headroom. There has been chatter in the past that Apple had experimented with creating an Extreme variant of their chips (basically 4 Max chips stuck together or something like that), but nothing like that had ever come to fruition. In imagining an Extreme chip, I took the existing M4 Max and added additional CPU, GPU, and Neural Engines to the design to create a Max Chip on steroids - increasing the number of CPU cores from 16 to 24 and the number of GPU cores to 40 to 110! Then I did the UltraFusion thing and stuck two super-supped-up M4 Max chips together to create an absolute monster of a chip.
The ridiculously supped up M4 Extreme Chip.
Chassis mocked up, chip design and specs speculated on, I worked on creating a faux press release. Apple has had a big push into AI, so I leaned into writing about how the new Mac Pro is the most capable workstation for AI workflows, even enabling researchers to run LLMs natively on the device. The intention in daydreaming was to make this machine an all-in-one device for serious research, data-crunching, and production workflows.
Press release to go alongside everything else.
And finally, because I couldn't help myself, I created a very limited run of M4 Extreme stickers for the occasion, which can be purchased (yes, they're actually real) below and in the mercantile. Enjoy & Happy April Fools'.
