In June of 2013, Phil Schiller took to the stage at WWDC 2013 to offer a sneak peek at the future of desktop computing.
With the proclamation of “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass!” (read STFU Woz) the new 2013 Mac Pro was revealed to the world to replace the boring, standard PC-like Mac Pro tower (aka the Cheese Grater) and Mac Pro Server edition. The new Trashcan Mac Pro was officially available in December of 2013 with some pretty impressive hardware:
- An Ivy-Bridge Xeon CPU
- Up to 64GB of DDR3 ECC RAM
- An internal PCIe SSD
- Dual AMD FirePro graphics cards
- Dual gigabit ethernet ports
- Six Thunderbolt 2 ports
- Four USB 3 ports
Officially, Apple only said that the RAM was user-replaceable, but the CPU wasn’t soldered onto the motherboard, so you could replace the CPU with another LGA 2011 compatible chip. You could also go with non-Apple RAM sticks and get up to 128GB of memory installed. However, that was it as the Mac Pro had adopted Apple’s new hardware pattern of using custom connectors, screws, and soldering anything and everything if possible.
As time progressed, people who purchased the new Mac Pro began running into an issue: the Mac Pro was starting to get outclassed when the newer GPUs and CPUs started coming to the traditional PC workstations and they could no longer replace parts themselves. The older tower design1 allowed the owner the ability to completely overhaul the internals of the machine, allowing it to change with the demands of the user, but now, they were stuck (and somewhat upset). The mindset became “I’ll sell this one and upgrade to the next one”, but there was one problem… the next one never appeared.
2014, 2015, and then 2016 came and went with not a peep from Apple on the future of the Mac Pro. This lead to a narrative in the Mac community that Apple had abandoned the Pro community. Finally, in April of 2017, Apple decided to change the narrative after keeping quiet for so long. The roundtable discussion was held with Matthew Panzarino (Tech Crunch), Lance Ulanoff (Mashable), Ina Fried (Axios), John Paczkowski (BuzzFeed), and John Gruber (Daring Fireball). In this discussion, Apple admitted that the new Mac Pro design was a mistake (an almost unheard of occurrence) due to the fact that the enclosure did not provide enough room for bigger components and that it has lead to them being limited thermally as to what they can do. To ameliorate customers, they announced that the Mac Pro would get a small spec bump and that a new “completely rethought” Mac Pro was in the works, but not coming out in 2017. Later, in June, we got this.
With the announcement and subsequent release of the iMac Pro at the end of 2017, people were under the impression that the new Mac Pro was coming soon in the first half of 2018. Fast-forward to today and there is still no new Mac Pro. To avoid the narrative taking a negative turn again, Apple discussed the state of the Mac Pro with Matthew Panzarino. However, the discussion has ruffled some feathers.
In the discussion, Apple revealed that the Mac Pro is coming “sometime in 2019” and that they are leveraging a new team to help design it called the “Pro Workflows Group”. The main problem with this is that come 2019, it’ll be 6 years since the Mac Pro has received a major update to put it on par with other workstations. Since Apple knew in 2014 that the Mac Pro was limited thermally, why did it take so long to do heavy market research into what the new design should be? Shouldn’t this process have started when they realized the Trashcan design failed? Probably, but I think the iMac Pro explains it. Apple (most likely) decided that the Mac Pro and Mac Mini should no longer be a part of the Mac lineup since the iMac was so popular and, therefore, decided that a Pro version of the iMac would satisfy all of the needs of their Pro desktop users. People that have used the iMac Pro (e.g. MKBHD) have given the machine high praise, but are still waiting for the Mac Pro.
The delay has caused some interesting comments on Twitter all of which boil down to “What’s so hard about designing a tower and putting stuff in it?”. I agree with the sentiment that creating a tower, putting a workstation motherboard in it, and then having a sufficient number of fans to cool it isn’t that difficult since that is how I build my gaming PCs, but I also understand the Apple-ness of it. Sir Jony Ive doesn’t want a giant aluminium case nor a tempered glass case with RGB lighting, he wants a minimalistic case that no one has done before that contains a custom designed Apple motherboard rather than a standard ATX or E-ATX board. Unfortunately, that means that it’ll come out when it is ready and we’ll just have to keep waiting2.
To close on something positive though, I really like the Pro Workflows Group. Having a team of experienced professionals who know their craft inside and out help shape the hardware, but more importantly, the software, is great. The ability to get feedback from end users who use everything on a daily basis is very helpful for engineers who design the products since, most of the time, they do not have to use it on a daily basis. I got the experience of going to client sites to gather feedback directly from physicians and nurses. By doing so, I learned a lot about why what I was working on was important, but also gained a lot of insight how the stuff I made was used that I would have never gotten by just staying at my desk. I really hope that the new workflows group helps uplift Apple’s software to greater heights.