Where are the new Mac Pros?
- nov
- 07
Mac Pro update — better late ... or never?
Apple hasn't significantly updated the new Mac Pro since introducing it at WWDC 2013 and that's led some to believe the company is giving up on their high-end desktop, the way they gave up on Xserve, their high-end server, in the past.
Technology changes, markets change, and people change, but some moments in history are uniquely high points that are never quite matched.
The world has never seen anything like macOS, and nothing will truly replace it. If we're forced to move to something else, it'll be painfully, inescapably, perpetually worse.
Keep the Mac Pro alive, Apple, so none of us have to make that choice.
The rest of the lineup is great for almost everyone. Almost. But please don't abandon those of us who truly want or need the best computers in the world, because if they're not Macs, they're not good enough.
There are reasons for a lot of things. Even if the Mac is incredibly, emotionally important to Apple from the very top on down, iPhone absolutely has to ship on time and everything else is a distant second or third to that, no matter how beloved.
Intel's chipset story has also been incredibly problematic for the last couple of years, even on the Xeon side where the Mac Pro lives. And fabbing what Apple wants for Mac Pro isn't the money-making segment for anyone.
But those are reasons, not excuses.
With my old cheese grater Mac Pro, even when I didn't update the box I updated the graphics card, RAM, and drives two years in a row. That was the sort of flexibility Mac Pro customers valued, and the genius of the casing design that customers cherished.
When Apple made Mac Pro an appliance, like iPad and MacBook Air before it, Apple took on the responsibility for keeping it updated. If I can no longer upgrade the graphics, RAM, or drives, it's their job to do it for me, consistently and reliably, or to over-communicate why the roadmap might be longer. Mac Pro isn't about surprise and delight, it's about people who's businesses depend on them having bleeding edge hardware.
I didn't buy the rev A modern Mac Pro, but I fully intended to buy the rev B. It just never came. Not a year later, not two years later, and now not three years later. It might come next spring but no one outside Apple really knows for sure. And that creates an incredible amount of stress and anxiety in the community. Stress and anxiety they don't deserve.
It may be impossible for a company like Apple to devote attention to every product all the time. Three years ago we got the new Mac Pro. Two years ago we got the 5K iMac. A year ago we got the new MacBook. This year we got the new MacBook Pro.
The problem is the lack of updates for some of them — Mac Pro and Mac mini specifically — in between.
Hopefully we'll see more and better of that next spring. Marco lists several reasons why it's not just a nice to have, but a must-have for Mac customers with high compute needs.