Want a Mac Pro? Michael Simon, writing for Macworld, lays out the basic problem:
In the first six months of 2016 we’ve seen new models of both the iPhone and iPad Pro, but the lone Mac to get any love is the newest member of the family. In April, the year-old MacBook received the kind of update MacBook Pro users have been waiting some 14 months for, with improved specs across the board: Speedier Skylake processors and graphics, an extra hour of battery life, faster SSD drives, and a new Rose Gold color option.
It’s worse on the desktop. While the iMac was refreshed in October 2015 to bring more pixels and processing power, the lowly Mac mini hasn’t had an upgrade since October 2014. And the Mac Pro has never been updated. The models on sale today have the exact same specs as the very first ones that rolled off the Texas assembly line back in December 2013. And if you’re looking for a display to go with it, good luck finding one made by Apple.
This feels like a pivot, a slow change to the base business model. Apple Inc. is not the same business it was when the iPhone was first rolled out. The publicly traded nature of the company requires larger investments, a focus on business elements that will move the needle at an ever widening scale.
My gut tells me a new MacBook Pro is in the works, the demand is palpable. But I’m not at all certain about a new Mac Pro.
One interesting aspect of this is pricing. When Apple first released the Mac Pro, the entry level model was $2,999, and the upgraded model (6-core instead of 4-core, more VRAM, upgraded GPU, more RAM) was $3,999. Those same models still sell for the same price, even though those models are now almost 3 years old and that technology is no longer best in class.
This is a problem for customers who want a best in class machine. Their options are limited if they want to stay with the Mac. I can only imagine that the revenue from Mac Pro sales does not move the needle much. My hope is that Apple will see this as part of the ecosystem and not as a standalone business.
Keep the Mac Pro’s coming, keep them best in class. Your developers will appreciate the refresh, having a machine that makes their code build so much faster. Your film-making customers will appreciate the faster renders. Your brand will appreciate the trickle-down loyalty a new Mac Pro will engender.
In short, don’t think of the Mac Pro as a business unit, think of it as a vital necessity in keeping the ecosystem vibrant.
From the article: “The thing about trucks is that despite how important they are to our daily lives, most of the ones we see on the road are old and ugly.”
Is he kidding? Other than SUV’s, big shiny new pickup trucks are all over the place. Guess it depends on the neighborhood. I think there is a good analogy to be made between the various Mac models and cars. And Apple has a lot of car fanatics on their team.
Apple seems to be paying only lip service to the pro creator market. Most are better served with a high-end iMac or PC. Or, do what I did and build a Hackintosh.
Big shiny new pick up trucks are driven by wannabes who use them to haul groceries from the corner store or pretend with their friends that they are working class heroes. 😉 The real pick up trucks doing the real work are beat up and generally older.
At least the SUVs, though pretentious, are used precisely for what they are built for: guzzling gas on local trips that are better suited to more economical vehicles.
As for whether beat up and old works in analogy with pro computing, I agree: not so much.
Don’t delude yourself, all evidence suggest the Pro lineup is dead. iOS and iHardware are the company’s bread and butter and the future is the Apple Car.
They killed the Thunderbolt Display. They haven’t updated the MBP in 4 years (outside of the occasional random speed bump). The MacPro is 2.5 years old going on 6 years before they finally kill it.
Think back to 2000 or so. Developers all had Windows or Linux computers and were generally either in the Microsoft or Java ecosystem. Over the last decade Apple has captured the developer market in a big way, regardless of the software you are writing.
Both the Android and iOS ecosystems have matured and services for these platforms is the current focus for most emerging tech – and this even includes the rapidly shifting large enterprise market. If Apple wants to keep iOS in the middle of all the action then they need to keep developers on their hardware. They need to keep the Mac Pro lines as the “no duh” choice for developers.
The annoying thing about the lack of updates is this… they launched a great new design, very nice machine, made a big deal of the fact that they were still innovating on the high end… and then utterly dropped the ball.
Anyone who needs that class of power is a fool to believe that Apple will keep the Pro updated. Sure, they could change, but their history with this model and the previous one says they won’t do it and Apple has no one else to blame but themselves for that perception.
I get that the iPhone drives the bus these days. That’s fine. But they need to get their shit together and have regular updates to their Mac line. Everything should get a yearly update (more or less… people understand that they’re tied to Intel for CPU releases). For models like the Pro, they need to decide if they want to keep them current and use them as a flagship example of Apple on the high end or they need to drop the line. Updates every 3-4 years satisfy no one.
I expect there will be a new Mac Pro some time soon. To not update it, is to essentially admit defeat since there has only ever been one single model of the current Mac Pro.
Considering the effort required to birth it, I doubt that the sales were so horrible, that someone has already cancelled the entire project (a requirement if we aren’t going to see any more of them). So there is likely already a “2.0” model in the works, even if they decide to sundown the device after that.
However, based on current Apple trends, it will probably:
The only response to the new emojis should have been to ask where pro updates are – not to have a discussion about emojis! Geez, covering for them much…
Not where I live. These are work horses driven by successful hard working people. Lots of beaters out there for sure, but there is a big demand for truck for whatever reason one buys them. SUV’s are popular with everyday people just as the station wagon of old was. People who shop for groceries are working class heroes. Don’t delude yourself.
Apple seems to be throwing away money by not building a Mac Pro that uses standard, upgradeable GPU cards. It just seems so stupid to me. What’s the point of building a Mac Pro that hardly anyone wants? Unless I hear the reason why Apple doesn’t want to build a Pro machine like other companies do, I have to assume Apple doesn’t know what Pro users want in a computer or they flat-out don’t give a damn.
Apple built the trashcan Mac Pro and it’s probably not selling. Apple can afford to correct that mistake and build a standard Pro box. Unless they don’t want to admit they were wrong in the first place.
sadly, the new mac pro had some “not so best in class” features (those ati-cards that were already old when it was released, lack of expandability,…).
i’m afraid they at least halfed their potential customerbase with the nMP and are now interpreting lackluster sales as a sign that the times have moved away from pro-machines.
Whatever the intention at the start, it now all looks ‘accidently-on-purpose’.
This is one time Apple should have taken the hit and not let its customers suffer for mistakes it has made.
I live in Oklahoma, and most of the shiny new pickups I see here have never hauled a load of anything. And you don’t need an SUV to drive two people to pick up some groceries, working class or not.
The article makes too much of the name change from Apple Computer, Inc. For a long time, they’ve usually called themselves “Apple” instead of “Apple Computer”. For instance, look at this page: http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/gallery2.html and the print ads starting in 1981.
The actually reason Apple changed their legal name in 2007 is they finally ended the trademark dispute with Apple Corps Ltd.
it seems clear to me that Apple is no longer interested in the Content Creation market, and is only interested in Content Consumption. Most of the tasks that needed the MacPro, can probably be done on an iMac. The lack of expandability cripples the machine, and once you start to “expand” it, an iMac is just as capable. I use a MacPro every day for Pro-Tools, but I have no doubt it would run just as well on an iMac. I just think the MacPro and the MacMini are both not long for this world. I’d be happy if Apple would outsource both lines to someone else, who could go back just a little to some degree of function over form….
You seem to have a lot of resentment of your neighbors over their vehicle choices. Maybe you should move?
I really have to agree: and it matters to me because my 2009 Mac Pro is no longer supported from macOS updates – El Capitan will be the last one. I absolutely love the old model because it primarily gets used (instead of a iMac) for the gargantuan available internal disk space (including SSD), as well as ability to feed multiple external monitors and the main change I was looking for to be upgraded (when the trashcan was released) was Thunderbolt support as well as a standard SSD boot drive.
The minuscule internal disk capacity kept me away from considering the trashcan in 2013 – and now I am being forced to switch my workhorse Mac to something new, but what? I do think they’ll release something new, but I’m afraid it will be just an updated trashcan.
Criticism = resentment?
I think you are right.
I have seen many CGI Mac users switching to Windows.
Mac Pros are great machines. Don’t kid yourself. Lots of internal storage is not important. Thunderbolt 2 made that irrelevant. I have a Promise Pegasus 2 R6 and it’s as fast as an internal SSD. Thunderbolt 3 will only make that better. People get so stuck on designs they’re used to that they never allow themselves to see the potential by doing things differently. Seems to me too many Mac users are like PC users these days.
I have to wonder with all that massive investment in the factory in Texas, how could Apple justify dropping the Mac Pro so soon? The only problem with that thinking is, the CEO and his buddies seem so enamored in the iPad Pro as computer that they forget their paper-pusher ways are irrelevant to use who do heavy lifting on a daily basis with our Mac Pros.
That being said, my Mac Pro at home isn’t used that much, and certainly not to its potential since I got the new Retina Macbook. It’s because I have used my Macs at home less and less for heavy-duty work. But when I fire up Photoshop and create books and calendars and do a lot of work on photos, the Mac Pro is still a delight to use. My 2008 Mac Pro sits in a corner waiting to be donated to a school, and my Mac Mini sits behind the TV where I hope to turn it into an Mac Server for Time Machine backups for everything in the house – and as a media server.
I think the image problem for the Mac Pro is that people want to treat it like a consumer machine, but it’s not. It’s not a Dell Inspiron that gets literally every speed bump Intel shoots out the door because the Joneses need to be kept up with.
The Xeon line is designed to be long-lived and stable. The internet can sit here and argue that Apple should have kept bumping the processors when they came out (which is only every 1-2 years, while we’re debating the abandoned status of a 2.5-year-old system), but to what end? In almost every case, that “outdated” 2013 system is still the fastest Mac Apple sells in CPU, OpenCL, and OpenGL performance. Both the Xeon and the Core families in fact got slower in later generations, and adopting a later Xeon would also have required Apple to make some substantial changes without even Thunderbolt 2 support to show for it. It’s not 2010 anymore; silicon’s running headlong into Moore’s Law. You’re not missing much by still using a processor from Q3 ’13.
Graphics cards updates would have been a more worthwhile update, but again, those cards are still putting up a good showing overall compared to the Mac line, and there’s a can of worms there too: Professional applications have long development cycles themselves, and they tend to be really cranky about unqualified new hardware. With most Mac Pro buyers on a ~3-5 year purchase cycle, and performance still more than adequate for most users, and you can’t trust a new graphics card for 6+ months, who’s gonna buy ’em?
I’m betting we’ll see an updated Mac Pro with Thunderbolt 3 and shiny new innards in the next year or so. With Thunderbolt and the Xeon line having just hit their next “tock” cycle (maybe — if Intel can actually get Purley out the door), the time is right.
Apple should just rename retina iMac to Mac Pro, with more TB ports, 6 core CPU, and better GPU.
Working on that move. Fairly broke right now because I live in a crappy economically depressed state. Feel free to donate to the cause, though.
Haha.. left one of those states already. The author made the truck analogy, and I think there is a market for big shiny new trucks and SUV’s and Mac Pro’s. Common denominator is price. That’s really all I’m saying. I don’t own either one, but I would not turn one down if someone gave it to me either.
The answer to this question is probably in Intel/AMD roadmaps. Skylake-H chipsets appropriate for the MBP just released, despite the extended whining on MacRumors etc that new machines should’ve been out many months ago, or the 15″ should’ve gotten the bump to Broadwell even though nobody would notice the 5-10% speed increase if they had no way of knowing which gen processor it was. I’m not super familiar with the Xeon lineup but I think Broadwell-E’s just came out in Q2 2016, and maybe Haswell-E wasn’t worth the bump? And didn’t AMD just announce its next gen GPU lineups for both mobile and workstation? These factors coupled with all signs pointing to a complete MBP redesign make sense. The Mac Pro I believe also has had some thermal issues, so to me it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Apple has been working on that in conjunction with waiting on the release of sufficient GPU/CPU updates worth an overall refresh of the Pro. I seriously doubt they went to the trouble of building the whole factory in Texas with its overly complicated production process just to scrap it all after one release.
People wishing for Apple to pull a rabbit out of a hat when it doesn’t exist in the case of the MBP update is silly. Maybe the Mac Pro should’ve gotten a GPU (and possibly CPU) bump but again maybe to Apple it wasn’t significant enough of an update, or testing resulted in problems, etc. Skylake Xeons are not til Q2 2017 which seems like a bit of a stretch to wait for on the MPs… so my guess is we’ll see new MBPs and MPs this fall, either alongside the iPhone release in Sept or at a separate Mac-centric event in October.
I’ve been a Mac user since 1984 and I can honestly say that since then, the numerous Macs I’ve had have been, and continue to be the central part of my digital life. Even after adding iOS appendages connected via various cloud conduits, my Mac is the main machine for me.
I’ve also been an Apple stockholder for much of that time and I’ve done very well with Apple stock. I know how Apple makes its money.
It bothers me when I hear Tim Cook say that the iPad Pro is the future of personal computing. If we take him at his word and couple that with the fact that both the Mac hardware and Mac OS haven’t had nearly as much love as its iOS brethren, I get nervous.
I was waiting patiently for a Thunderbolt monitor with the same anti-reflective glass as the 27″ iMac. Boom, wish evaporated.
I’ve been waiting patiently for Apple to integrate iOS backup on Time Capsules (or home made “Time Capsules”) and clean up iOS syncing through the colossally awful iTunes. It’s been too many years and all I hear is Eddie Cue making new deals for TV Guide, not cleaning up the mess he’s made with iTunes.
Many commenters here are thinking Apple has thrown in the towel on content creation, which as a long time user I can say used to be Apple’s bread and butter and I think the commenters are right. But, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing: Apple can make pro level machines to run Lightroom and Photoshop on and this is where I think Apple seems to be making a mistake in walking away from this market.
And, the people who make up this market (no doubt many of the commenters here) are Apple’s oldest and most loyal users. Yes, the iPhone now sells to people who don’t own other Apple products but those people were not the early adopters, we were. Where’s the acknowledgement of Apple’s long term users and supporters?
I get the feeling that a number of things are at play here:
Apple has to cannibalize human resources when OS deadlines approach, or at least this is what I’m told by folks in the know. I wonder (as both a user and stockholder) why this is? This company has a lot of money, is building the most expensive building on earth (maybe) and pretty much sells whatever they put their name on so why is it that they don’t have enough people to meet deadlines and get the bugs out of their software?
There have always been turf wars within Apple and sometimes we get to see the end results when people leave or are fired. Big egos, strong personalities, and conflicting visions… I’m guessing one of the reasons at least some of Apple’s development seems stuck is a turf war.
Some folks think of Apple like a shark: if it’s not moving forward it will die. And this seems, at least on the surface, to be influencing how things are done: continuously come out with new product categories (watch, car, etc.) when the more conservative among us would like more attention paid to keeping the old categories which we’ve been using for years and have based our lives on alive and working well.
I think Apple should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time: they should be able to do the necessary (and expensive) R&D to come up with new products and keep the current products not only alive, but consistently at the top of their respective product categories. The unevenness in this is troubling for me, as both a user and a stockholder and the Macintosh and all of us Macintosh users need a lot more attention.
Yeah, I think he was riffing on the idea Steve Jobs said about desktops being the trucks, but him taking it further than Jobs did pushes the analogy too much 🙂
And I wouldn’t turn down a Mac Pro or a big shiny truck, either. I’d probably sell them to fund my escape from Okieland. 🙂
Have a good one!
Who uses a Mac Pro for development?
I’d get an iMac any day; faster single cores run a dev environment better than per-core-slower massive parallelism (in my experience – but I’m a Windows developer, even if I prefer OSX at home).
The Mac Pro’s target market is really media professionals, not developers.
Developers don’t need any of the Pro’s strengths; a high-end iMac or MacBookPro is where they’ll flock.
Yeah, I’d love to know how many people actually bought a Pro.
I don’t think it’s a big enough number, is why it’s languishing.
Thought experiment:
Would a high-end iMac be even the slightest bit worse at your workflow? Yes, the Pro is a delight … but so’s an iMac, ain’t it?
I can’t help but suspect (photo-editing and page layout, right?) the answer is “no, not at all”.
That’s why the Pro’s moribund.
(I myself use a Mini as a household server, driving a Drobo.
It could probably use biennial updates, but honestly it’s not in a segment that really “needs” constant refresh.
“Is appliance.”)
I apologize if I was being obtuse. “Mac Pro lines” includes MacBook Pros.
That aside, you are absolutely right.
Can’t really see myself dropping 20k plus on an Apple car considering that Apple is the poster child for Corporate ADHD. I just don’t trust the companies commitment to something I may keep a decade and need servicing. Hey they could surprise me but if their product isn’t SIGNIFICANTLY better than Tesla I’m not buying in.
iMacs would be fine, but Apple is going to sell the Mac Pros they leased to us, for $2,400 on average at the end of three years. They were all Mac Pros with 8 or 6 cores and the D700 graphics cards. They’ve got at least three more year’s life. Though one has the bad graphics cards which are now in a recall.
The Mac Pro is dead, Jim.
It isn´t. Apple is waiting for the Skylake EP Xeon Chips to be released since these ones support USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt 3 via USB type C port.