Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Bad feeling in the pit of my stomach - Mac Pro line may end at WWDC?
- Thread starter Lil Chillbil
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
No, the mac pro is not a loss leader. It's profitable, and it's unpopular. It's basically the opposite. It's the expensive product that is seldom bought but whose existence lends heft and legitimacy to the business. Like a store having a $1000 bottle of wine for sale behind a glass case.
I've seen two quotes from Apple, they're working on "something really great" and "something really different". That is so nebulous that even the wildest speculations are still justified. One of them being "There will be a new Mac Pro". 
Er no - If the Mac Pro is a flagship, its the sort that gets set in concrete outside of Apple HQ to remind people of the days when Apple's core market was media professionals - back in the days when Windows was a joke 16-bit operating system still based on MS-DOS and Intel was making crappy Pentium 4 space heaters that the G5 PPC could run rings around.
Apple's flagship products are now the iPhone and iPad. Apple's flagship Macs are either the retina MacBook Pro or the 27" iMac. That's what they want punters to trade up to when they walk in to buy a cheap Air or Mini. Mac Pros are going to be bought buy people who know exactly what they need... and people who need a Mac Pro (or any other tower-format PC) are a continuously shrinking minority as, one by one, they find that laptops are powerful enough for their needs, all their rendering is done on headless servers or GPU-based systems or that their software is now available for kick-ass Windows workstations assembled cheaply from commodity hardware.
It wouldn't satisfy die-hard Pro users, but I think Apple would make more money off a "Mac Mini Pro/headless iMac"-type machine that would attract pro-sumer "power users" and serve as the go-to platform for Mac/iOS developers (who don't need Mac Pro-like specs).
The other possibility is that their "something great for Pro users" will just be a range of Thunderbolt peripherals.
Extremely unlikely. Apple has shown very little interest at all in become a dominating Thunderbolt or any peripheral vendor for that matter.
The TB display is they unique spin at a docking station, but it is also just to juice more volume out of iMac parts. ( iMac screen , design queues , physical sockets , etc. ).
The TB Ethernet and Firewire dongles are driven primarily out of Apple zealotry to evict the ports from the "Retina" laptop models when they know that a significant fraction of those potential buyers still need them. ( To a slightly less extent with FW kicked off the iMac .... but kept on the Mac mini. )
Other than that zip from Apple. Even the dongles took a long while to get to market. Lots of talk about what other partners are doing, but Apple isn't trying to fill the broader market space.
If TB gets some traction in overall PC space they won't have to. It is never going to (nor was it intended to be ) a USB 'killer'. To be a big TB perhiperal vendor one of the presusors is to have a large PCI-e card line up. Apple never got into that very much at all.
Apple sells Time Capsules and Airport Extremes but those aren't out to conquer the categorizes. They are good, solid offerings but they aren't keeping Netgear/Linksys-Belkin/Synology/etc. awake at night due to nightmares.
Apple has backed out over time of the printer market, the monitor market (spinning that these docking stations are monitors but without Apple system increasingly not all that useful.) , etc.
I think we are really saying the same thing but just using different words.
My point about a "loss leader" is the company does not really care how much it contributes to the bottom line (yes, MPs are expensive, but look at them as a percentage of their net). They help your other products and the company itself.
Look at it this way. If you had a product that did not earn you directly as much as your other products you have to have another reason for keeping it other than a strict cost analysis, right? Sure Apple will not turn down the money from the sale of MPs but they will stay around because of their indirect benefits to the rest of the lineup.
This. To a certain degree the classic Macbook Pro 15" as well but they are too portable to be the profile anchors the Mac Pro's are.
You must be reading my brain. LOL
Predictions for WWDC 2013 - Apple announces that OS X 10.9 will be the last Mac-specific OS X, after that OS X "goes to 11" and to the PC. Apple may decide to certify PC vendors or have some sort of curation mechanism to make sure Apple OS experience is not compromised.
Justifications for the speculation:
Mac OS X has been renamed to OS X and "Mac" branding removed.
Pro customers will get their pro Apple OS systems from 3rd party vendors. Apple takes credit for taking a bold step forward. They can also put a spin on this by saying they can now concentrate on mobile devices (should be great for their stock prices).
Maybe not discontinue it, but surely change and cripple it to the point that its not the same Mac Pro we all love and enjoy. I expect, if the rumors are correct, no internal expansion. It will be a Mac Mini or iMac type of machine with PRO stuck on it.
If the new Mac Pro turns out to offer no expansion whatsoever which is the direction of Apple's current Macs, desktop and laptops, then its a sheer waste of money since it lacks the expansion PRO users need.
Another idea is if Thunderbolt really will live up to its promise at eliminating internal expansion, but I don't relish the idea of having tons of external devices hooked up to it and none external.
----------
Hi,
I am in agreement with you. WWDC is not going to be good for PRO users. I just have this feeling the new Mac Pro won't be such a PRO machine at all given Apple's direction. The days of OPEN MAC and expandability are surely numbered. Apple doesn't like expansion of any Mac machine. Heck, my laptop which is an HP has room for two hard drives, video chip upgradable and processor is also upgradable. Its a damn shame Apple charges so much for their "non-upgradable" machines.
If the new Mac Pro turns out to offer no expansion whatsoever which is the direction of Apple's current Macs, desktop and laptops, then its a sheer waste of money since it lacks the expansion PRO users need.
Another idea is if Thunderbolt really will live up to its promise at eliminating internal expansion, but I don't relish the idea of having tons of external devices hooked up to it and none external.
----------
Hi,
I am in agreement with you. WWDC is not going to be good for PRO users. I just have this feeling the new Mac Pro won't be such a PRO machine at all given Apple's direction. The days of OPEN MAC and expandability are surely numbered. Apple doesn't like expansion of any Mac machine. Heck, my laptop which is an HP has room for two hard drives, video chip upgradable and processor is also upgradable. Its a damn shame Apple charges so much for their "non-upgradable" machines.
In the Pre-iMac/Steve Jobs days. The Pro users in graphics and audio were the only people keeping Apple limping along.
All their growth as a company is due to the iTunes Store and their iPod/iPhone and iPad lines but their OS marketshare growth is down to offering lower end systems to home users who switch to the Mac because they're impressed with Apple's other products and realise the do actually have a choice in OS and Mac OS X is far more friendly than Windows and far more supported than the geek OS alternatives.
All their growth as a company is due to the iTunes Store and their iPod/iPhone and iPad lines but their OS marketshare growth is down to offering lower end systems to home users who switch to the Mac because they're impressed with Apple's other products and realise the do actually have a choice in OS and Mac OS X is far more friendly than Windows and far more supported than the geek OS alternatives.
So the Mac Pro is dead.
Long live the Mac Prosumer mini!!
Steve is spinning in his grave...
and walk out the store with an expensive black soda can. But the added carbonization mean up to 2x performance over the 2012 and earlier big, shiny silver box of detergent. I just wish they'd added Nvidia GTX Titans or GTX 770s rather then ATI Fire Pros. CUDA rocks while OCL languishes. Internal upgrade DIY options appear to be minimized now from top to bottom.
Last edited:
Probably the Apple managers that saw that they were going to nuke the iPod gen 4 from iOS 7. Like I said earlier that one seemed related to iOS 7. I thought it would be just some subset of features.... they nuked the whole thing. ( given multitasking for everybody in app land... that I didn't see coming. ... I suspect that is one of culprits... )
If they don't release it simulatanously with affordable external multi-drive housings, it's a joke for some uses because the external drive companies are having a field day with criminally overpriced Thunderbolt systems.
If Apple made a basic dumb, Thunderbolt to SATA 6Gb/s system that's hardwired as seperate SATA channels and shows up to the OS as a 4 channel SATA 6Gb/s PCIe card and it was affordable, as in a £150 add on at time of purchase not £500+ like the offerings from the likes of Lacie or Drobbo, then it's problem solved but they won't. Look what Apple charge for a 1 drive Time Machine drive!
If the Mac Pro is only £1,299 at launch for the entry level model and it exceeds the performance of the 27" iMac for raw CPU power, then it'll be worth it. If they have the cheek to charge £2,000+ it better be mindblowingly fast because there's E5 geekbench scores out already for dual CPU E5 systems running Windows 64bit and the 12 core version scores 26184:
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1984074
Compared with the 16 core version that scores a massive 45843:
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1928782
For the lack of internal expansion, just from a drives point of view there's only several options:
1) Expensive drives populated with 5400 or 5900rpm drives in the £500+ price range that would be ideal as user-installed bare systems if they were nearer £150.
2) Expensive external cases without drives in the £500+ price range that are almost double the cost of Firewire 800/USB alternatives available from the same company who make them (Drobbo).
3) The Seagate GoFlex system which as an interface is over-priced for what it is, only allows 1 drive unless you buy several and daisy chain them together and even though Seagate make perfectly acceptable 7200rpm drives with 64Mb caches, their GoFlex drives are all pre-populated with the usual low spindle speed trash.
I actually plan on buying a used 3.5" GoFlex drive, cracking it open to fit my own 7200rpm drive and then buying the oxford chipset based Firewire 800 GoFlex adapter for £30 or so for use with my Mac Mini. This is for 1 drive and makes sense for my personal uses because I still have a USB 2.0 drive for backup and I can shove the drive it comes with in my old G4 as back up.
It's still a very wasteful work around.