Given Apple’s current locked-down trajectory with the Mac, the Mac Pro was gonna die eventually, and it’s for the best that it does given it was reduced to little more than a massively overpriced Mac Studio grafted onto a useless PCIe backplane; a $12k grift, basically.
PCs at least are still modular and expandable; for now.
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Cloudlfare down. tl;Dr?
Apple is killing the Mac Pro.
It’s back up now.
My wonders are around how this will effect the video software market in say 10 years. In 2010 if you said you wanted to get into video editing I would have said I dnt know much but people swear by professional tools developes for Mac os x.
If Mac Pros go aways, professional software wouldn’t be used by big industry, but rather just hobbyists… Which to me seems like the death of video editing long term on Mac.
Maya still has a Windows port so it’ll be fine, also, Blender proved itself viable on the professional stage with Flow.
So you think with no professional use people will train to use them when if you got hired by a company they won’t use them? It seems like a scare to me. I’m not an apple user, but yikes
Assuming most of Hollywood isn’t already Windows based given that OS still takes up 66% of the desktop market while Mac only takes up 14%.
And given Blender’s viability on the professional stage with Flow’s success, I wouldn’t be surprised if some smaller studios which weren’t already knee-deep in the Autodesk and either MS or Apple ecosystems either were already Linux-based or moved over to Linux.
As for the hobbyist, they’ll just use whatever OS they’re already running generally, be that Windows, Mac, or an alternative, and I’m being vague with ‘an alternative’ so as to also count BSD or even OpenIndiana if one swings that way, in addition to Linux.
On one hand, bummer. But on the other, sort of a waste of hardware anyway.
I was a big time pro user. G3 tower with DVD card, G5 dual, Mac Pro 5,1 with dual X5690’s and other upgrades. But I had to drag those systems kicking and screaming out of Apple’s walled garden to do what is second nature on the PC side of things. Loved the OS back then, but not all users were braindead drones.
“Pro” stopped being a moniker for advanced capability, instead the most expensive, least hobbled version.
I hope whomever replaces Cook (rumor has it) once again remembers what it was like to be a nerd under all that businessman authority.
Oh yeah, the G3 tower was a thing of beauty - neat design, serviceable, and lovely to use <3
If I were shareholder I would want answers as to what the actual hell Cook is doing right with Apple. Every decision just seems to be intentionally designed to lose money.
From all the messing around with core products, to the bizarre decisions that led to the updated vision pro, a device no one is interested in, been upgraded to the latest version of the device no one is interested in, now with tungsten. Nevertheless I’m sure the iPhone sock is going to be a rip roaring success.
They could replace him with a goldfish swimming around a tank to make decisions, and it would lead to more coherent outcomes.
I would agree as a customer, but as a shareholder?
Apple has been increasing user hostility, investing in questionable hype stock market hardware/software, pumping services profits, padding their war chest, and pushing prices to their absolute limit, literally to favour their shareholders. For a long time.
All the rich at Apple are shareholders first, users second. That’s the conflict of interest.
Michael Reeves as next apple CEO. He (his fish) has the experience necessary. And possible lead fumes intake required for the job.
Users like you are far more expensive for Apple in terms of tech support than some idiot who just wants a cool laptop. It was a strategy decision to drop professional application development.
maybe we’ll see the mac pro again in apple 2: the search for more money
Apple 2: the search for more money aired in 1977.
We’re WAY into the Apple Universe at this point.
Well this was very obviously coming. The last iteration was pointless and from that they didn’t bother to even refresh it in a while, I assume it sold fuck all.
I admit I’m using my 1,1 as an extra seat in the office, but it’s form of use.
My dad had a G5 (essentially the same case design externally) and this guy is probably not kidding, those things felt like a massive aluminium block
I admit I’m using my 1,1 as an extra seat in the office, but it’s form of use.
And I bought it back in 2006
Looks like non-functional 2006 Mac Pros are on eBay for $60. Cheaper than an office chair!
wdym, how does a block you sit on become non-functional?
It falls over?
Good point!
Some businesses have that genetic ideological backbone that defines what they can and can’t do with good results.
In case of Apple - at some point they were a “cheaper and better for home users, but less serious and more toyish” computer company in their advertising and, well, quality. And in some sense this seems to have carried through from the 90s till now, as their equilibrium.
And honestly when in the 90s they were gradually becoming something more luxury, that was already a mistake. Then Jobs came with the NeXT purchase, and, of course, with Apple’s financial situation then it was probably the only way to survive to further go in that direction.
It actually made me optimistic about that company to read rumors about them preparing to go for lower market with another laptop model in 2026.
Because the world has changed, and I’d say not only Mac Pro is a suitcase without handle, I’d also say the same about iMacs. If they are not making an extensible stationary machine, then having a few laptop lines (cheap light, good light, powerful heavier) and a stationary line (well, Mac Mini and Mac Studio seem that, stationary normal and stationary powerful) is optimal. Since each line means expenses and different components and separate advertising.
It sort of feels as if they were returning to the roots. Perhaps they feel that they are stalled or losing in the mobile market, and same with the luxury market - their cult offensive was impressive, but it’s wearing out. While with desktops they have a chance at rapid expansion.
In no world has Apple ever been the cheaper option
The Mac Classic was the first Mac to sell for under $1k, and the ‘LC’ acronym stood for ‘Low-cost Color,’ that said IIRC even back then there were PC clones that were cheaper than the at-the-time cheapest Macs, and that were actually expandable to boot even if they didn’t ship with better specs out the box. Also, the Mac Classic still shipped with a 68k and 1MB RAM, maxing out at 4MB. In 1990. When the 486 had been out for a year and the 386 had been out for five years, and I’m pretty sure PCs were shipping with more than 1MB RAM by then.
Even within Apple’s own lineup at the time, the original Mac LC shipped with an '020 vs. the Classic’s 68k.
Additionally IIRC the Apple IIc was sold as a cheaper variant of the Apple II line.
Being the “low cost Mac” is very different from being the cheapest option.
Though I’ll say that my one Mac purchase in the early 00’s was a few years after they switched to OSX and I bought a Macbook Pro for probably 60%+ more than the equivalent PC but it lasted me over 2X as long as any PC ever had prior. Plus the free OS upgrades that were unheard of on Windows machines at the time.
Their advertising pressed differently in early 90s.
The M-series Mac Pro was always for companies which were going to rack them and use them in render farms. Normal people was never its intended market. It was more of an Xserve successor.
Apple would need to design a different CPU for the Mac Pro, and the limited market doesn’t make it feasible. Descending the M-series CPUs from the A-series limits what the designs can do.
There are rumors of a CPU split in the Apple lineup. iPhone, iPad, iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook get the A-series, and MacBook Pro, Mac Studio. Mac Pro get the M-series. That would make sense, and might give them some room to expand the “Pro” procs.
I thought there were already some M-series iPads that gave some actual workstation laptops a run for their money though.
iPads have always had the problem of having waaaaay way more compute power than they were ever capable of utilizing.
Yep. The iPad Pro lineup is M-series.
Or - and this is a wild theory - just cripple the ones using a-series chips and keep the m-series the same but charge more.
A-series would already be at a disadvantage due to being designed for iPhones and the design parameters that entails compared to the M-series.
I can’t remember if it’s announced or rumored, but I think there’s an entry-level MacBook coming with an A17?
They’re overpriced crap now. You buy at a 3x premium for the hardware, and you get the OS. That’s it.
But it all lives in a big cheese grater
I’d consider it if they just sold it as an atx case. But then again, I probably couldn’t afford it because just the wheels accessory is $700.
The cases of old ones are on eBay, as I mention in another comment.
And it looks like someone has made ATX mounting kits.
https://thelaserhive.com/product/mac-pro-atx-kit-with-psu-mount/
I’ve seen people mod old cheese graters, but almost all of them in my opinion ruin the case. Those british kits are the most common and pretty bad.
https://www.tomrei.com/2016/11/apple-power-mac-g5-casemod/
This one got pretty close, even though it needed to be painted and didn’t do the rear holes. Other decent ones keep the old expansion slots and just make another hole for motherboard io.
