The currently Mac Pro which was revealed in a stunning form factor certainly turned plenty of heads. However, it is the heads of users that were left spinning after a while, as there were more issues than met the eye with that generation of Mac Pros. Apple is a company that is known to offer cutting edge design and at times, technology in their hardware, and to learn from their past mistakes -- which is exactly what they are going to do with the new Mac Pro.
A pre-announcement, if you can call it that, has already been made concerning the Mac Pro. Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, shared, "This is in between product announcements. There's no black drape that's going to come off something right now. That's not why we're here. We’re in the process of completely rethinking the Mac Pro.”
Close to four years back, Apple revealed the current Mac Pro design which was cylindrical in nature. It certainly took the road not traveled in terms of a desktop design that made it look a whole lot more like some sort of soundbar or subwoofer as opposed to a desktop computing machine that is packed full of power underneath the hood. On the outside lies a removable, polished aluminum shell which sports a special component triangle which will carry both GPUs together, in addition to a beefy Xeon CPU as well as a thermal design that helped out with the cooling, all the while ensuring that the whole Mac Pro ran a whisper quiet operation.
Of course, this unprecedented design also saw some long time Mac Pro fans walk away from it, which is another lesson to learn from: familiarity does not breed contempt all the time. Not only that, there were issues with the Mac Pro. Apart from being a solitary solution that intends to cater to a diverse range of professional customers who indulge in very different yet artistic routes, such as music, science, photos, video, coding, and development, it failed to be flexible enough to handle the Mac Pro’s market segment utility concerns.
It also did not help that the iMac of that generation proved itself to be more than capable of handling a great many number of tasks, and hence, cannibalizing on the sales of the Mac Pro back then. After all, if users were able to obtain something that could perform just as well, but comes at a fraction of a price, why not take the plunge? It was then that Apple decided for the new Mac Pro to turn a corner -- not only in terms of design, but also in making sure that it has the ability to appeal to long time Mac Pro fans as well as returning ones.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, shared, “So many of our customers were moving to iMac that we saw a path to address to many, many more of those people. We did not come to terms that we needed to do more.”
We do know that the new 2017 Mac Pro will feature an Apple Pro display as opposed to an LG manufactured one, and chances are we can be prepared to be wowed.
