Thoughtful post from Marco Arment on the current Mac Pro design, with collected thoughts on where Apple should go with the model currently in the works.

This particular paragraph captured my feelings about the 2013 Mac Pro design:

While minimalism is one aspect of one view of good design, it’s often overused, underconsidered, and misunderstood, resulting in products with surface-level appeal that don’t actually work very well because they were optimized for visual design and minimalism rather than overall real-world usefulness.

And from the wrapup:

There is no single design, no single set of trade-offs, that addresses a large set of pro users: they all want different things, and the only way to serve that with one product line is to have it be extremely versatile and offer a wide variety of configuration options. You can’t do that with a minimalist industrial-design indulgence like the 2013 Mac Pro.

Good read.