You’ve probably seen the forum posts or the frantic Reddit threads asking about the Mac Pro 2020 M1. It’s a ghost. A tech myth. People search for it because they remember the massive shift Apple made to its own silicon, but here is the cold, hard truth: the Mac Pro 2020 M1 does not exist.
Seriously.
Apple did launch the M1 chip in late 2020, but it went into the MacBook Air, the Mac Mini, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro. The big, cheese-grater Mac Pro was left sitting in the corner with its Intel Xeon processors for years. If you bought a Mac Pro in 2020, you were buying a machine powered by Intel, not Apple Silicon. This confusion is everywhere. It stems from the fact that 2020 was the "M1 year," and the Mac Pro is Apple's flagship, so people naturally assume they overlapped. They didn't.
Why the Mac Pro 2020 M1 Confusion Still Persists
It’s weirdly easy to get mixed up. In June 2020, at WWDC, Tim Cook stood up and announced the transition to Apple Silicon. He said it would take about two years. Naturally, everyone looking for a high-end workstation started waiting for the Mac Pro 2020 M1 to drop. But the Mac Pro is a different beast. It requires massive thermal headroom and PCIe expansion that the first-generation M1 chip simply wasn't designed to handle.
The M1 was a "system on a chip" (SoC). It was meant for efficiency. Putting an M1—the same chip found in a fanless MacBook Air—into a Mac Pro chassis would have been like putting a Prius engine in a heavy-duty pickup truck. It doesn't make sense.
The Intel 2020 Reality
If you go back and look at the actual 2020 catalog, the Mac Pro was still using Cascade Lake Intel Xeon W processors. We’re talking about 8 to 28 cores of Intel power. It was expensive. It was hot. It was also the only way to get 1.5TB of RAM at the time.
Apple actually updated the Mac Pro in 2020, but not with a new chip. They added the Radeon Pro W5700X GPU option and later some SSD kits. That’s it. No M1. No revolutionary ARM architecture. Just more of the same Intel-based heavy lifting. Many professionals felt stuck. Do you buy the Intel Mac Pro now, or wait for the Apple Silicon version that everyone thought was coming in 2020?
Comparing the M1 Pro/Max/Ultra to the 2020 Intel Mac Pro
When the "pro" chips finally did arrive, they didn't go into the Mac Pro either. They went into the MacBook Pros (2021) and the Mac Studio (2022). This created a huge performance gap.
An M1 Ultra Mac Studio, which arrived much later, started outperforming the $15,000 Intel Mac Pro in almost every synthetic benchmark. Geekbench scores showed the M1 Ultra hitting multi-core numbers that made the 12-core and 16-core Intel Mac Pros look like toys. But benchmarks don't tell the whole story.
The real reason someone would still want that 2020-era Intel Mac Pro over an M1-based machine today is expansion. You can't stick a PCIe card into an M1 Mac Mini. You can't upgrade the RAM. In the 2020 Intel Mac Pro, you have eight PCIe slots. You can add Afterburner cards, RAID storage, or specialized audio interfaces.
Thermal Realities
The Intel Mac Pro is a space heater. It’s built to move air. The M1 architecture is the opposite. Apple Silicon thrives on "low and slow" power draw with massive bursts of speed. Because the M1 uses unified memory, the CPU and GPU share the same pool of RAM. This is incredibly fast for video editing but has a hard ceiling. If you’re a 3D artist needing 512GB of VRAM for a scene, the M1 (and even the later M2/M3 iterations) can't touch what a multi-GPU Intel Mac Pro setup could do with dual Radeon Pro Vega II Duos.
📖 Related: Why Pictures of Lunar Eclipse Usually Look Terrible and How to Fix It
The Gap Between 2020 and the M2 Ultra Mac Pro
It took until 2023 for the Mac Pro to actually get Apple Silicon. That’s a long time to wait for a "2020" dream. When it finally arrived, it used the M2 Ultra.
A lot of people were disappointed.
Why? Because the M2 Ultra Mac Pro was basically a Mac Studio in a bigger box. It didn't support external GPUs (eGPUs). This is the biggest sticking point for the "Pro" crowd. If you bought an Intel Mac Pro in 2020, you could upgrade your GPU later. With the Apple Silicon version, you’re locked in.
What You Should Actually Buy Today
If you came here looking for a Mac Pro 2020 M1, you’re likely looking for a bargain on a powerful workstation. Since that specific machine doesn't exist, you have two real paths.
- The Mac Studio (M2 Max or M2 Ultra): This is what most people actually wanted when they imagined an M1 Mac Pro. It’s small, quiet, and handles 8K video like it’s nothing. Honestly, unless you need PCIe slots for specific audio cards or massive internal NVMe arrays, the Mac Studio is the better buy.
- The Used Intel Mac Pro (2019/2020 model): These are hitting the secondary market hard. You can find them for a fraction of their original $6,000+ price tag. If you run Windows via Boot Camp—something Apple Silicon can't do natively—or you need specialized PCIe hardware, this is still a viable machine. Just know it’s loud and uses a lot of electricity.
Don't Fall for the Scams
You might see eBay listings or refurbished sites labeling things as a "Mac Pro 2020 M1." Avoid them. They are either mislabeled 13-inch MacBook Pros or they are sellers who don't know what they're talking about. In some cases, they might be the 2020 Mac Mini M1, which is a great little computer, but it’s not a "Pro" workstation.
Specific Use Cases: Who Wins?
Let's look at software. If you're using Final Cut Pro, the Apple Silicon chips (M1, M2, M3) are optimized to a degree that Intel Xeons just can't match. The Media Engine on the M1 series has dedicated hardware acceleration for ProRes. An Intel Mac Pro from 2020 needs a $2,000 Afterburner card just to keep up with a base M1 Max chip in video playback.
However, if you're doing heavy virtualization or running older Linux kernels that aren't ARM-compatible, the Intel Mac Pro is your only choice.
The RAM Limit
Unified memory is faster, but it’s expensive and limited. On the M1 Max, you were capped at 64GB. On the M1 Ultra, 128GB. The 2020 Intel Mac Pro? You could shove 1.5 terabytes of RAM in there. If you're running massive scientific datasets or huge orchestral libraries in Logic Pro that require 200GB+ of samples to be loaded at once, the "mythical" M1 Mac Pro wouldn't have helped you anyway.
📖 Related: Pittsburgh Doppler Weather Radar: Why Your App Is Often Wrong About The Rain
Actionable Steps for Pros
If you are currently looking to upgrade your studio or workstation, stop searching for a 2020 M1 model of the Mac Pro. Instead, follow this logic:
- Check your I/O requirements first. If you don't know what a PCIe card is, do not buy a Mac Pro. Buy a Mac Studio. You will save $3,000 and get the same performance.
- Verify your software compatibility. Use sites like "Is Apple Silicon Ready?" to see if your plugins or specialized tools run natively. If they require Rosetta 2, you'll lose some of that M-series speed.
- Look at the M2 or M3 series. Since it’s now 2026, the original M1 is getting older. The M2 Ultra and M3 Max chips have significantly better ray-tracing capabilities that the original M1 generation lacked.
- Don't overpay for Intel. If you do go the used route for a 2019/2020 Intel Mac Pro, don't pay more than $2,500 for a base spec. The value is dropping fast because Apple is aggressively moving all software support toward Silicon.
The Mac Pro has always been Apple's most confusing product line because it doesn't follow the yearly refresh cycle of the iPhone. The "M1" era was a transitional period that skipped the Mac Pro entirely, leaving a gap in the timeline that still trips up buyers years later. Stick to the Mac Studio if you want the M-series power in a desktop, or hold out for the latest M-series Mac Pro if you absolutely must have those expansion slots.