There really is no way to sugarcoat this except to say that Apple has lost the plot when it comes to this segment of the Mac desktop market and that 2017’s round table discussion and the outcome from that, was more or less a reactive stance to the fact that they dropped the ball with the 2013 Mac Pro, yet made no corrective course for several years until the critical mass hit the fan regarding the questions that came up throughout 2016 and on about the future of the product as well as the pro desktop demographic.
This isn’t even rocket scientist where users in this niche demographic aren’t necessarily looking for the company to reinvent the wheel like they did with the 2013 Mac Pro (which folks like myself did not bite on). Simply put, actions speak louder than words; mobile was a much more important focus (which I cannot complain about as a shareholder) but the Mac Pro (desktop speaking) segment was left to languish (not good for me as a customer) where now, the company is trying to figure out and execute a plan.
9 months after my last blog entry, I’m still tooting away on my 2010 Mac Pro but am also using that ASUS gaming system that I also wrote about. I’m still using an iPhone 6 Plus (which would represent the last Apple product that I purchased). Safe to say that as each year passes, the less stickier I’ve become when it comes to being trapped within Apple’s ecosystem.
While not sexy at all from a new product design perspective, that 2006-2012 cheese grater design with updated internals would’ve sufficed for a large majority of this particular desktop niche. Several posts below from last year, I stated what I needed to say and very little of that has seemed to changed.
Instead, Apple engineers are now once again trying to come up with a gee-whiz product design based around pro workflows that in no way, can cover every single way that others use their systems to accomplish their tasks. And part of the solution for that is in software whereas there are only so many ways to design hardware form factors (which the round cylindrical Mac Pro, turned into a thermal dead end for them). And this is where Apple can be its own worst enemy.
And I’m not very confident on the engineers take on modular design which is probably going to be this plug-n-play myriad of external boxes that causes that mess of power chords/bricks and cables. Until NVMe SSD’s hit the capacities of mechanical hard drives (which are now up to 8TB), those slower drives will still be home for scratch disk and archival storage (which my 2010 Mac Pro conventiently houses 5 of them (plus my PCIe SSD system drive) without having this horrible mess of power bricks hanging all over the place.
By the time this newly designed Mac Pro comes out (sometime in 2019 which I am betting is going to be closer to the tail end), I may no be a customer for Apple’s desktop systems (and whatever they come up with may not even fit my needs and be priced so out there where it will be the final nail for me where I will just need to keep this 2010 model alive for as long as possible).
