And for that, we’re sorry to disappoint customers who wanted that, and we’ve asked the team to go and re-architect and design something great for the future that those Mac Pro customers who want more expandability, more upgradability in the future.
The current Mac Pro, as we’ve said a few times, was constrained thermally and it restricted our ability to upgrade it. One of the good things, hopefully, with Apple through the years has been a willingness to say when something isn’t quite what we wanted it do be, didn’t live up to expectations, to not be afraid to admit it and look for the next answer Enough so that we need to take another path. And what we discovered was that it was great for some and not others. Schiller was unusually frank.Īs we’ve said, we made something bold that we thought would be great for the majority of our Mac Pro users. The meeting was a high-profile one, with Craig Federighi, and John Ternus, who heads Mac hardware, also present. No USB-C, no Thunderbolt 3 (and so no support for the LG UltraFine 5K display) Nothing else is changing, including the ports. The $3999 model goes from 6 CPU cores to 8, and from dual D500 GPUs to dual D800 GPUs. The $2999 model goes from 4 Xeon CPU cores to 6, and from dual AMD G300 GPUs to dual G500 GPUs. In the meantime, Apple is today releasing meager speed-bump updates to the existing Mac Pros. The GPUs, down the line, to get more performance per dollar for customers who DO need to continue to buy them on the interim until we get to a newly architected system.Īpple told Gruber and others that as the new machine won’t be available this year, it is today upgrading the existing model, albeit in modest form. The CPUs, we’re moving them down the line.
This is not a new model, not a new design, we’re just going to update the configs. In the meantime, we’re going to update the configs to make it faster and better for their dollar. Some… it’s the kind of system they wanted others, it was not. None of this is black and white, it’s a wide variety of customers. To be clear, our current Mac Pro has met the needs of some of our customers, and we know clearly not all of our customers. In the interim, we know there are a number of customers who continue to buy our. We think it’s really important to create something great for our pro customers who want a Mac Pro modular system, and that’ll take longer than this year to do. Now you won’t see any of those products this year we’re in the process of that. We have a team working hard on it right now, and we want to architect it so that we can keep it fresh with regular improvements, and we’re committed to making it our highest-end, high-throughput desktop system, designed for our demanding pro customers.Īs part of doing a new Mac Pro - it is, by definition, a modular system - we will be doing a pro display as well. With regards to the Mac Pro, we are in the process of what we call “completely rethinking the Mac Pro”. Phil Schiller acknowledged that the 2013 Mac Pro had not been well received by many pros, and it was this that had led to the radical rethink. Apple bet on a dual-GPU design (multiple smaller GPUs, with “pro”-level performance coming from parallel processing) but the industry has gone entirely in the other direction (machines with one big GPU). The idea that expansion could be handled almost entirely by external Thunderbolt peripherals sounded good on paper, but hasn’t panned out in practice. But that tight integration made it hard to update regularly.
It was tightly integrated internally, which allowed for some very nice features: it was small and beautiful (a pro machine that demanded placement on your desk, not under your desk) and it could run whisper quietly. The company admitted that its 2013 model approach hasn’t been as upgradable in practice as it had hoped.Īt some point came to the conclusion that the 2013 Mac Pro concept was fundamentally flawed. The company is also updating the existing Mac Pro today – and will be making new Apple Displays to go with the future model, along with new pro-focused iMacs … Many of us wondered whether the Mac Pro line was dead, but Apple has told Daring Fireball’s John Gruber and others that it is continuing development on its high-end desktop, and will after this year be releasing a ‘completely rethought’ model with a modular design intended to make the machine more upgradable.Īpple is currently hard at work on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro, with a modular design that can accommodate high-end CPUs and big honking hot-running GPUs, and which should make it easier for Apple to update with new components on a regular basis.