Daring Fireball: The Mac Pro Lives

I’m really excited about the new Mac Pro from the perspective of Industrial design. When Apple updated the MacPro in 2013, it was literally the future of Industrial Design. The shiny aluminium, the cylindrical unit with a unique way of accessing the internals were all something that one had never seen before. I have a feeling that we’ll see something similar with this new “modular” mac pro. Perhaps, stackable expansion components? That create a time machine like tower, but can be replaced or removed as per the user’s needs. 

There’s surprisingly so much that can be explored with modular concepts, that hasn’t been done previously. Would be a shame if it goes back to the cheese-grator design (which I’m pretty sure is not going to happen, as I’ve never seen Apple take a step backwards in terms of a design language, cheese grater macs looked great with the Macbook Pro of 2006, not the Apple computers of 2017).

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There’s been so much angst about the future of Mac Pro off late that it’s refreshing to see a press briefing outlining the road ahead for the professional desktop computer. However, I wanted to write a few words about the F.U.D on mac hardware. Ever since the October introduction of Macbook Pro, there’s been this constantly growing angst amongst the Apple community that Mac is now a legacy product. That Apple doesn’t care about anything but the iPhone and the fact that these computers are being updated at such a pace, indicates that Apple’s soon going to abandon their least money-making business.

I feel these fears are found on flawed ideas. The MacBook Pro was delayed by about an year and 6 months (if we are to believe that they need to be updated annually), the iPhone 4S was delayed by an year and 5 months back in 2011. Apple doesn’t delay new releases because it doesn’t want to make the products any more. Apple delays them if they are not ready. 

The Apple I’ve known and loved for 12 years, would rather ship a mac pro in 2018 than ship an unfinished version that causes more problems than solve them. Their focus on pushing out the “Best Hardware, when it’s ready” is what makes them so great. They’ve never been about speed. They’ve always been about quality.