Twice Bitten
Designed to be the top-of-the-line Macs for the top-of-the-line folks, the Mac Pro has battled thermal constraints & silicon swaps that have made it feel like a precarious purchase in recent years.
At the end of Apple's Peek Performance event, John Ternus, SVP of Hardware Engineering, teased that while the transition to Apple Silicon was "nearly complete," Apple still had "one more product to go, Mac Pro, but that is for another day." I thought this was an interesting decision by Apple, given its reputation as such a tight-lipped company, to explicitly mention future hardware after just announcing a brand new Mac. My take on the situation was that Apple intended to do two things with this out-of-character announcement: first, clarifying that the Mac Studio, while incredibly powerful, is not a replacement for the Mac Pro, and second, making sure customers know that Apple isn't planning on abandoning it's Mac Pro consumers a third straight time. It’s been a hard decade to be a fan of the Mac Pro.
Mac Pro Woe
Released in 2003 as the Power Mac G5, it was renamed the Mac Pro when Apple migrated to Intel chips in 2006.
Initially released in Mid 2003 as the Power Mac G5 before transitioning to Intel processors in 2006, the first generation of the Mac Pro, affectionally teased as the cheese grater, was regularly updated with new chips, RAM, and graphics. So far, so good.
The second-generation “trash can” Mac Pro quickly ran into a thermal and expansion bottleneck. Though sleek and beautiful, it overlooked the expandability and ports Pros wanted for their high-end work.
Then in 2013, Apple teased a completely new ground-up redesign of the Mac Pro, a sleek & shiny aluminum cylindrical design that was touted as having "twice the performance" of the old Mac Pro. The overhauled design featured a polished stainless steel body, was cooled by a single fan, and manufactured in the United States. But beautiful though the Mac Pro was, it quickly became apparent that Apple had painted themselves into a thermal corner. It was minimally upgradeable, and its singular cooling system could not keep pace with updating chips and graphics. The result was a Pro device that didn't see any regular updates, going an astonishing 2,182 days (that's six years!) before it was ultimately discontinued in late 2019. This Mac Pro shook the confidence of many in the Apple community who felt Apple either didn't care about them or were incapable of delivering a Pro-grade tower. This concern over the Mac Pro & developer relations soured to the point that Apple held a rare town-hall meeting in 2017 to gather feedback and assure pros that the Mac Pro they had been hoping for was on the horizon.
Announced at WWDC 2019, the third generation Mac Pro returned to its towering form with an extra helping of fans, ports, and expandability.
That Mac Pro, the successor to the 2013 trash can, debuted at WWDC 2019 and was released later that winter. Returning to the tower and modular frame of the first-generation, this Mac Pro addressed both the thermal and expansion issues that plagued the trash can Pro. Now customers could create the ultimate Mac to their hearts/budgets content: from an 8-core up to a 28-core Intel Xeon, the ability to have up to 1.5TB of RAM, dual Radeon Pro graphics cards, and an optional dedicated Apple Afterburner card for video decoding. Starting at $5,999 and climbing to an astonishing $52,199 (max specs + optional Mac Pro Wheels), the Mac Pro gave Pros, with the proper budget, the ability to create the most powerful Mac Apple had ever made. And then, six months later, Apple silicon happened.
Now the announcement to Apple Silicon didn't obsolete the just-released Mac Pro. I'm confident Apple will support Intel-based Macs for the foreseeable future, and besides, those that bought these machines for their workflow out of need rather than want will still get years of use to satisfy their investment. But let's call it out; it was uncomfortable to see the transition to Apple silicon begin less than a year after folks had invested so much money into these powerhouse Intel machines.
But the awkwardness didn't stop with M1, each time Apple announced a new chip, first the M1 Pro & M1 Max in the MacBook Pro and most recently the M1 Ultra in the new Mac Studio, the features and performance gains of Apple Silicon have begun to outshine the Mac Pro. If early Geekbench scores are to be believed, the base-model 20-core M1 Ultra Mac Studio ($3,999) outperforms a maxed out 28-core Intel Xeon Mac Pro ($12,999). And what about that $2,000 Afterburner card you added to the Mac Pro? It turns out the new M1 Pro chips have dedicated video encode/decode engines that are more powerful than the Mac Pros Afterburner.
Put simply, if I were in the category of Pro customers looking at the next Mac Pro, I think I'd be peeved. In the past decade, Apple has been guilty of both not doing enough to replace an aging computer and, second, of outclassing its top-of-the-line hardware at a fraction of the cost only a few years after the 3rd generation Mac Pro was announced. From one extreme to the other, it's been hard to trust what was going on with the Mac Pro.
Twice Bitten, Thrice Optimistic
Maybe I'm prone to flights of fancy, but I'm cautiously optimistic that Apple won't make a mess of the Mac Pro a third straight time. Apple in 2022 seems of the mentality to give "pros" pro things, even at the cost of more utilitarian design. And in recent years, Apple has nearly completed the transition to Apple Silicon and has shown a dedication to designing for rather than against thermal limits - both the MacBook Pro & Mac Studio had their thermal capabilities prominently highlighted during their announcements. These two changes address the sins of its predecessors, so unless the next Mac Pro becomes an existential threat by ripping a hole in spacetime, it'll be a much safer purchasing decision than the Pros that preceded it.
The introduction of Mac Studio also seems intended to funnel some customers away from a future Mac Pro towards a device that suits their needs better than a Mac Pro. Podcasters, photographers, mid-level content creators would have a hard time justifying the next Pro based on need over what a Mac Studio can deliver. Apple has done Pros dirty with its two most recent Mac Pro iterations. Still, I'm hopeful the Mac Studio, the end of the Apple silicon transition, and heightened respect for what pros want will restore the balance to Apple's top-tier desktops.
