Marco Arment lays out a list of the kinds of things that only a Mac Pro can deliver. The list is well thought out, highlighting the holes in the current Mac lineup. One in particular struck me as central:

The brand-new MacBook Pro maxes out at 16 GB and the iMac maxes out at 32 GB. The three-year-old Mac Pro can go to 64 GB from Apple or 128 GB aftermarket. Some pro workloads simply need more RAM than the consumer and mobile chips support.

And there’s also this:

If Apple doesn’t address someone’s hardware needs, there’s no alternative. We can’t just buy hideous Xeon workstations from Dell and install macOS on them. If we can’t do what we need on Mac hardware, our only choice is to leave the entire Mac platform.

But the competition isn’t even close.

My hope is that Apple has a new, upgradeable Mac Pro in the works. My worry is that they don’t.