And the reason has everything to do with the growth of Apple’s own app ecosystem. That company, MacStadium, has been buying Mac Pros at a scale that most people and many businesses couldn't fathom. There’s a pretty good chance that the 2013 Mac Pro might have remained a viable product thanks in no small part to a single company that has proven effective at converting the Mac to a server environment. Those Thunderbolt 2 ports could not replace all the missing drive bays and PCI slots which, for all the size they added, prevented your desk from becoming a mess of cables, cords, and boxes. Its dual-GPU structure quickly proved to be a bad bet and its “thermal corner” locked the company into a limited design that scared off enthusiasts and high-end business consumers alike. An Apple Insider review from early 2014 explained its appeal like this: “Taken as a whole, the new Mac Pro's design is one of Apple's best case studies in form following function.” Other reviews from the period were glowing.Īs the years moved on and the upgrades failed to surface, however, that reputation changed dramatically. Instead, single GPUs just kept getting more powerful.Īt first, the trash can received a positive response. The 2013 Mac Pro's Achilles' heel was graphics capabilities, which predicted a future in which dual-GPU structures would become common. Objectively, the machine was quickly outclassed by competitors.
#APPLE MAC PRO COMPUTER CYLINDER UPGRADE#
Ask the right folks, and you might hear stories of corporate or education buyers who waited to upgrade their workstations, saw the Schiller speech, and responded by buying as many “cheese grater” Macs as they could get their hands on, scared off by what they saw as a limited design and frustrated that Apple didn’t make it available in time to work within their yearly budget. The 2013 Mac Pro has such a bad reputation that users have been willing to go with the prior iteration-a device that’s bigger than a breadbox and doesn’t even support USB 3.0 ports, let alone the USB-C ports that Apple has made a centerpiece of most of its Mac revisions since 2016.
This has led to recommendations to stick with either the 2012 Mac Pro, with its roomy and upgradeable design that reminds many of a cheese grater its 2009 counterpart, whose BIOS can be flashed to be roughly compatible with the 2012 model or a Hackintosh, which allows the level of upgradability that the 2013 model replaced with a bunch of Thunderbolt 2 ports. Generally, the party line about the 2013 Mac Pro, both from pro users and on Mac enthusiast websites, is that the machine is a failure. You wouldn’t think so if you read comments online.
They’ve been on the market for more than half a decade. You want pro hardware at a pro cost? You got it.Īs for the trash can, these machines are still floating out there. This week’s WWDC announcement is an attempt to win those creatives back with a design (and upgradability approach) that evoked the good old days. What was once seen as a symbol of Apple's continued dedication to its pro-user audience is now seen as a symbol of how much the company had abandoned them. (You can still buy one today, starting price $2,999, despite the WWDC announcement.)īut that machine came with so many perceived failings from an upgradability standpoint that it’s worth pondering what it represented about Apple. The 2013 Mac Pro was also seen as extremely expensive when it first came out at $4,000. Now those users are getting a machine that actually lives up to this line in the form of the 2019 Mac Pro, which is out this fall for an eye-watering starting price of $5,999, along with a 6K monitor that has a $4,999 starting price. For six years, we’ve been living with a device that its target audience seemingly couldn’t stand. But now we’re well into 2019, just about six years after Schiller made the comment, and long after the line had fallen into self-parody.