At its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced a plethora of upgrades for its existing product lineup as well as the new Vision Pro headset. While the 15-inch MacBook Air received its due size upgrade, the processor and the performance were kept the same. However, Apple did upgrade the Mac Studio with an M2 Ultra chip and announced the new Mac Pro with Apple Silicon. While the new M2 Ultra-powered Mac Pro is plenty powerful on its own, it lacks the option to support a graphics card. Well, Apple executives have finally given us an answer to why the new Mac Pro lacks graphics card support.

M2 Ultra Mac Pro does not support graphics cards as the company went with a unified architecture for better optimizations

In terms of internal design, the Mac Pro tower comes with six PCI Express expansion slots for storage, networking, and much more. However, it lacks support for a graphics card, unlike the previous Intel-based model. With the previous Mac Pro, you would get a dedicated slot for the graphics card, which would work in conjunction with the Intel processor. Apple's hardware engineering chief John Ternus stated that the company has not pursued external GPU support on the Mac Pro.

Ternus stated in an interview with Daring Fireball's John Gruber that the Mac Pro does not need an external graphics card because the entire operations are handled by the M2 Ultra chip. He explained that the M2 Ultra chip architecture is based on shared memory and optimizations. With support for an external graphics card, the optimizations would be compromised, and "it hasn't been a direction that we wanted to pursue."

Other than support for a graphics card, the new Mac Pro also does not feature support for user-upgradeable RAM. Due to the unified nature of the M2 Ultra chip compared to the Intel-based Mac Pro, the RAM is soldered to the chip. If you are not familiar, the M2 Ultra chip inside the Mac Pro comes with a 76-core GPU coupled with 192GB of unified memory.

According to Apple, the new model is 3 times faster than the Intel-based Mac Pro for specific real-world video transcoding and 3D simulations. Furthermore, video processing is on par with the Intel-based Mac Pro that came with seven Afterburner cards. There is a significant price difference between the M2 Ultra and Intel-based Mac Pro models. The base model of the prior is priced at $6,999, while the latter will cost you $12,999.