Apple’s Hard Mac Pro Lesson: Don’t Put Aesthetics Ahead Of Utility
Some
of Apple’s professional and creative users have had a crisis of faith about its
commitment to their needs. The company’s unusual pre-announcements aim to
change that.
After neglecting the Mac Pro line (and its pro and creative users)
for more than three years, Apple finally said that it’s
working on a new version of the machine that corrects some of its predecessor’s
most serious flaws. (In the meantime, the company is immediately improving the
configurations of the existing Mac Pro, giving buyers more processing cores,
higher-end GPUs, and additional RAM for their money.)
Even back in 2013 when Apple introduced its newly designed Mac
Pro, some of the Mac faithful were upset. The new Mac Pro
was smaller, quieter, and way cooler looking than its predecessor, but it also
made upgrades and expansion way harder.
Yes, Apple had redesigned the older (big, silver, heavy) Mac Pro
down to a small, elegant black
cylinder the shape of a small bathroom waste basket. But it had also
built the graphics processing units (GPUs) into the design such that they were
impossible to replace or upgrade.
The Mac Pro used two GPUs running in parallel, a configuration the
industry has since moved away from. And the board the chips rested on was
carefully situated around a central, triangular cooling corridor in the middle
of the “trashcan.” This made it tough for Apple to update the design, perhaps
with a more powerful single-core GPU, and still have enough cooling power
inside the unit.
Creatives like graphic designers, videographers, and audio
engineers appreciate good design, but in the Mac Pro, Apple’s dual
obsessions with design and miniaturization were at odds with long-term
performance and utility. It turns out those GPUs in the 2013 Mac Pro weren’t
powerful enough to handle some of the applications pro and creative users work
with today.
“Things like VR, and even the movement to do more machine learning
on local workstations are current examples of things Apple would not have seen
coming that would likely have caused them to make a different design decision,”
says Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin in an email to Fast
Company.
And Apple made the Mac Pro almost completely dependent on its
Thunderbolt connections to connect to external hard drives, RAID
arrays, and specialized equipment, another factor that rankled the
creative/pro crowd, who were accustomed to the internal slots and bays offered
by the Mac Pro’s earlier incarnation.
GETTING THE WORD OUT
While creatives and professionals are a relatively small
segment of Apple’s customer base, they are among its most loyal users.
(The company, remember, wasn’t always a smartphone Goliath.) Keeping
the creatives happy has something to do with Apple’s soul. Mac
Observer’s John Kheit put it this way in 2015:
When Apple was circling the drain into bankruptcy around 1997,
those core users stayed loyal and helped influence many other users. It is a
giant mistake for Apple to not understand it is alienating its most core group
of users, a mistake which Apple may one day very much regret.
That’s why Apple had a handful of journalists
out to its campus to discuss the future of the Mac
Pro. Apple knows some of those Apple faithful have already lost faith,
and others are rapidly losing it. And with good reason: The
company hadn’t upgraded the Mac Pro for more than three years, and when it did
upgrade the MacBook Pro many creatives use, many thought the
device was underpowered and overpriced. Apple rarely talks about specific products that aren’t ready to
ship, but in this case it had to.
“Apple had to act fast to assure their ‘Pro’ customers that they
love them, have a roadmap, and haven’t abandoned them,” says analyst Patrick
Moorehead of Moor Insights & Strategy. “I don’t think Apple anticipated
that their customers would push back so hard on this and some of them are even
moving to Windows-based platforms.”
Apple’s Phil Schiller told the journalists that his company is now
hard at work designing a new Mac Pro, but that it won’t come out this
year. Schiller also wouldn’t say if it will come out next year: “We’re not
going to get into exactly what stage we’re in, just that we told the team to
take the time to do something really great . . .”
Schiller did reveal that the next Mac Pro will be a modular
system, and that Apple is working on a powerful new display that will be good
enough for graphic designers and video editors. And it’ll be a design that
learns from the mistakes of the past.
“. . . we are in the process of what we call “completely
rethinking the Mac Pro,” Schiller said. “ . . . we want to architect it so that
we can keep it fresh with regular improvements, and we’re committed to making
it our highest-end, high-throughput desktop system, designed for our demanding
pro customers.”
Depending on when the new machine and monitor actually appear,
they may be good news for people working in new mediums. According to Creative
Strategies’ Bajarin, “Apple appears to be moving in a direction that will now
allow Macs to play in the market for VR, PC gaming, machine learning, etc.,
where we will see many innovations in GPU computing still to come and having
expandability will be as important as ever.”
As for the existing Mac Pro, Apple told Fast Company it’s
upping the specs in the existing $2,999 and $3,999 models. The $2,999 model now
comes with a 6-core Intel Xeon processor (up from 4-core), dual AMD FirePro
D500 GPUs and 16GB of memory. The $3,999 model comes with an 8-core (up
from 6-core) processor and dual D700 GPUs.
The second key message of the day was that Apple will announce new
configurations of the popular iMac desktop line later this year that it
believes will be welcomed by many professional and creative users. But
there was a third less-obvious message to pro users in Apple’s unusual press briefing, as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber points out. Even though Apple ultimately didn’t disclose much in the way of
specifics about its upcoming machines, it did say that it will continue to
produce industrial-strength video and audio software for its
industrial-strength hardware.
“I just want to reiterate our strong commitment there, as well.,”
Schiller said. “Both with Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X, there are teams on
those software products that are completely dedicated to delivering great pro
software to our customers.”
BY MARK SULLIVAN
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