New Mac Pro Won’t Arrive Until 2019
Matthew Panzarino (Hacker News, MacRumors):
“We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community, so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It’s not something for this year.” In addition to transparency for pro customers, there’s also a larger fiscal reason behind it. […] This is why Apple wants to be as explicit as possible now, so that if institutional buyers or other large customers are waiting to spend budget on, say iMac Pros or other machines, they should pull the trigger without worry that a Mac Pro might appear late in the purchasing year.
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To be blunt: Is this the original story arc of the Mac Pro’s development, or are we looking at a roadmap that has a fundamentally different timeline than one year ago.
“I don’t think that the timeline has fundamentally changed,” says Ternus. “I think this is very much a situation where we want to measure twice and cut once, and we want to make sure we’re building a really well thought-out platform for what our pro customers are doing today. But also with an eye towards what they’re going to be doing in the future, as well. And so to do that right, that’s what we’re focusing on.”
While there are no further details on the exact shape that the Mac Pro will take, Boger says they are still very much in the modular mindset.
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My recent conversations with Apple (including the ones cited in this piece, but not those alone) lead me to believe that they know they kept going on a path with pro customers that they felt was working long after it had, in fact, begun to erode. I’m not exactly sure what the timeline was, but given the fact that the Mac Pro won’t arrive until 2019, I’m guessing just before the round-table discussion a year ago.
I don’t see a way to spin this as anything other than crushing news. Either pro customers are still a low priority at Apple or the company is just unable to execute. Yes, technically Apple did not promise last year that the Mac Pro would arrive in 2018, but that was the clear implication. If the timeline hasn’t fundamentally changed, that now seems like a deliberate misdirection. And, even now, Apple is not committing to “early 2019,” just sometime during that year.
How could the “path” have been working until 2017 when Apple knew in 2014 that the 2013 Mac Pro was a thermal dead-end? The 2013 design had already been met with skepticism when it was announced at WWDC six months before shipping. For many users, there hasn’t been a “real” Mac Pro update since 2011. The implication is that until a year ago Apple’s only plan was to build iMacs.
And as far as rectifying things, Ternus’s comments make it sound Apple is taking exactly the wrong approach. This was not the time to do fundamental market research, rethink what a professional computer should be, and come up with a revolutionary new design that will last. The way to show pro customers that Apple cares would have been to give them what they were asking for—a new cheese grater—as soon as possible and then get working on the future. (Foregoing a stopgap model might have made sense if Apple had been targeting, say, early 2018, but apparently that was never the case.) Making perfect the enemy of good just sends the message that Apple isn’t listening and you should switch to Windows.
Instead, everyone is stuck waiting, yet we still have no idea what the new Mac Pro will be, and thus whether it’s worth waiting for. Apple hasn’t said what it means by “modular.” If all it means is “no built-in display,” that’s not very helpful. Certainly, this is not “transparent” and “open” communication.
And, in the meantime, there hasn’t been so much as a CPU bump to the 2013 Mac Pro. This was the “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass” model that was supposed to show Apple hadn’t forgotten about the pro market.
The Mac Pro, announced in April 2017 is not coming until 2019. If Apple’s development lifecycle is generally two years, then the April announcment was pretty much an “oh shit, we need to respond to consumer outrage moment.” Bizarre.
I can’t imagine why sourcing a pretty space grey xeon motherboard from foxconn and CNC milling a slightly shrunken and thinned version of the Cheesegrater case should take this long. Unless of course, they are overthinking it. Which they are.
When Apple transitioned to Intel, they sent generic Intel motherboards in the cheesegrater G5. Suck up pride and just ship us a damned top of the line motherboard and GPU with drivers now (outsource it like the displays). 6+ years of waiting on a Pro machine is a bit much.
Great that Apple is being open about its work with professionals. But yeah, with a six year gap between releases, be nice if they could give more detail about the plans for this product. Maybe find out ahead of time whether they’re building the right/wrong machine this time?
Just stick a freaking Xeon in a large box. Literally should be the easiest product they release in any year.
Bingo. Am I a broken record yet? STFU about new products TIM! AND, if you can’t (like Mac Pro) then don’t semi-lie. Set realistic goals, then add fluff, and over-deliver.
This unforced errors, and “delays” because you set your own deadlines you can’t hit is so idiotic.
Interesting that now we know it’s 2019. But not much to offer hope of a pro-oriented MBP revamp - it feels to me like they’ve as with the Mac Pro they’ve painted themselves into a thermal corner making them so thin + can only partly mitigate that with eGPUs.
Talk is irrelevant when the action reveals disdain for pro user. Had a lengthy discussion this AM about Pro direction, the widespread attitude is find a new platform for work. And try to convince purchasing managers that 2015 hardware is needed for ports, escape key, etc 🙃🤔🙄
As somebody who desperately needs a new headless desktop Mac, it’s incredibly frustrating that Apple can’t ship one. Apple’s determination to create the ‘perfect’ Mac Pro instead of just shipping a damn box leaves us with no options. At this point I’d take a damn G5/DTK chassis
Previously: The Mac Pro Lives.
Update (2018-04-05): Tim Ekl:
Taking this thought one step further: what if the Mac Pro were the first ARM-based Mac? What if it shipped with a couple dozen ARM cores, happily parallelizing the kinds of workloads the Mac Pro is known for?
That would be interesting—and yet another reason to ship a stopgap cheese grater.
Sure, I wish the new Mac Pro were coming sooner. But overall this story is fantastic news for pro users — it shows Apple not only cares about the pro market, but that they’ve changed course and decided that the best way to serve pros is to work with them hand in hand.
Apple should just reopen its clone program at this point.
This gigantic delay between announcement and delivery? That tells some of us that there’s no point in waiting, because if they were going to give us what we wanted they could have done it pretty much instantly: give me a plain old tower — you can make it all fancy and aluminum and pretty, who cares, I’ll even shrug and pay extra for it — with a plain old motherboard and some plain old PCIE slots.
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Based on all that, when I hear them say it’ll be modular, I shudder to think what their interpretation of that will be[…]
Update (2018-04-06): Nolan O’Brien:
Mac Pro and Mac Mini for years were the easiest products for Apple. Bump the damn specs and ship it. Maybe adopt modern I.D. improvements over time, but holy hell this is abysmal.
The complaint of the Mac Pro in 2012 was not that the I.D. was stale, but that the specs were.
I wonder if (a) the decision makers at Apple are struggling with cognitive dissonance -- if they’re honestly incapable of grasping how easy it would be, in this particular case, to delight us with a new thing that isn’t revolutionary; or (b) more cynically, they know perfectly well how easy it would be, but are terrified of hurting the mystique around Apple design by proving their detractors are right, that there’s nothing uniquely magical about Apple’s hardware; or (c) we’re all wrong about the obvious thing to do now, and in the long run, what they’re doing will actually be best for all concerned, even if it’s hard for us outside Apple to see it. There was a time I could have believed (c), but I don’t now.
I don’t care if you put 32 cores in it and 256GB RAM. If it’s a sealed, all-in-one, non-expandable product, it isn’t Pro.
Workflow teams from StarWars were the same narrow group that liked the trashcan. I’m getting worried about this upcoming “modular” Mac. The trashcan Mac was “modular” with a octopus nest of wires and boxes snaking from it. I don’t want a “modular” Mac. I want an expandable Mac.
I don’t think Apple considers developers Pros. They are building these machines for video and animation studios that buy dozens at a time. Why would this Apple care what a single developer thinks if they’re only going to buy one pro machine every 5-10 years? I don’t agree, but...
I have to say, though: this makes no sense to me. Pros need new Mac hardware more than anything, and it’s needed yesterday. You can’t research for all current (and future) workflows. The Mac Pro is half a decade old. Release. a. new. one.
I’d like to add something, however, that hasn’t been widely discussed. And that is the notion of technical admiration and aspiration versus mere aesthetic design.
Update (2018-04-09): Benjamin Mayo:
It’s certainly interesting that rather than questionnaires or soliciting phone calls, Apple is actively hiring these creative professionals in-house. […] I guess the danger here is that you tune too heavily towards the workflow team’s base of talent, which is currently composed of video artists, animators and music technicians. Requirements from other fields — of which the ‘pro’ market is very vast — may be de-prioritised or ignored entirely. Software development comes to mind.
Update (2018-04-14): See also: Accidental Tech Podcast, The Talk Show.
Update (2018-08-23): Steve Troughton-Smith:
Nvidia’s new RTX 2080 Ti is a mind-bogglingly-powerful GPU; that very likely means Thunderbolt 3 isn’t gonna come anywhere close to maximum performance as eGPU. that new Mac Pro better be something, because otherwise Mac users are gonna be left behind in a graphics revolution
It does suck that if you want a GTX 2080 Ti-like performance in a Mac, the only option you have is “wait 5 years and maybe AMD will have something as powerful that Apple’s comfortable shipping”. This is precisely why the Mac Pro needs to exist, and why it needs to have PCIe slots
Update (2019-01-01): Marco Arment:
When I made that $5 bet with @caseyliss in @atpfm #213 that the 2013 Mac Pro would still be for sale on January 1, 2018, I wouldn’t have predicted that it would also still be for sale on January 1, 2019.
At this point, it’s remarkable that they can even get the parts for it.
Update (2019-05-14): Malcolm Owen:
The first “leak” for the modular Mac Pro has surfaced in the form of a supposed internal Apple document for the device, alleged evidence for the highly-anticipated Mac that has many questionable elements making it very hard to believe is genuine at all.
