Since the iPhone, Apple has become gradually ever more controlling of its products and users. It wants to curate 100% of the experience, from hardware to software but also wean its users into being unable to function without its products or have them look behind the veil.

With the M-Series of chips Apple has been able to demonstrate the benefits of this strategy to its fanbase.

The Mac Pro remains an outlier in this regard. Its customers want to be able to mod the machine as they see fit. If Apple were to release an M-Series Mac Pro with user-upgradeable RAM with no loss in performance then it would open up a lot of questions from laptop owners as to why they can't either, shattering the veil.

So they bring out the Mac Studio, an all-in-one that outperforms the Mac Pro and then quietly retire it from the line by making the next version of MacOS M-Series only.