Not necessarily the end of the road for the Mac Pro, maybe just a new beginning. Just entertain the following hypothesis for one second:
Between the end of 2011, right after Mr. Jobs passed away, and sometime in 2013, Apple redesigned the Mac Pro and built manufacturing facilities in the US. Clearly the mandate for new management was to increase profits, and no one wanted a machine that was upgrade-able for nearly a decade, although they must have missed the fact that for the professional market customization and flexibility are paramount.
The new Mac Pro is by no means a workstation, and there is no way in hell that it can qualify as such. The fact that it has outdated Intel Xeon CPUs at its heart and can use a whooping 64GB of ECC DDR3 doesn't make it a workstation. Lets not forget the wimpy 450 Watt PSU or the horrendous and impossible to upgrade D300, D500 and D700 GPUs (3 year old by now ?!).
So back to my original thought: managements mandate to increase profits. Oh yes, someone miscalculated that these must sell like crazy due to the cool factor and because they are an Apple product. Lets not kid ourselves here, because for professionals it is far more important to have the right tools for the job than to look cool while working.
All in all the new Mac Pro did not bring Apple enough profits to justify further development. Going back to a more conventional design (back to a nice shiny tower) and updating the platform to Haswell-E/Skylake-E and DDR4 would mean at least three things:
- by doing so they would admit that they screwed up
- profits would still be small because customers wouldn't pay for overpriced RAM, SSD drives, CPUs, and so on, as most folks would just buy the minimal configuration and perform their own upgrades
- Apple wouldn't enjoy the huge savings on shipping costs if they would go back to an aluminum tower - and no, I would not buy a Mac Pro in a cheap stretched steel and plastic case (like those crappy PCs)
To wrap things up:
Well, apparently the writing is on the wall: bye-bye Mac Pro. The only possible future that I see for the Mac Pro is one in which
Apple will partner with IBM (or another major manufacturer) and that manufacturer will build workstations running OS X, with an Apple EFI present on the motherboard instead of the usual uEFI. Apple will be in charge of the software, while the manufacturer will be in charge of the hardware.
I'd imagine that Apple would only entertain this possibility if they want to maintain a presence in the professional and enterprise markets where high end workstations are needed.
Further down the line I think that Apple wants to slowly turn into a service provider over the next decade or so, while maintaining a strong foothold in the mobile market by keeping their platforms proprietary. By devoting more and more resources to iOS I believe that Apple will at some point completely abandon the Mac and instead they will finally license OS X as a standalone product, or they will partner with certain manufacturers and license it as OEM. Hardware quality has increased dramatically, to the point where a lot of hardware today is far better than what Apple is selling in their Macs. Certainly these won't be cheap clones, and if I'm right about Apple partnering with others, then Apple will most likely want to maintain control over the firmware.
But who knows, I'm just speculating here.
The bottom line:
It's all about profits and
the bottom line. Apple will always do what's best for Apple, for their share prices to go up and for their shareholders to make money. Apple doesn't care about enthusiasts, or about how much we love the classic Mac Pro. If they can't hit their target and make their margins, the product will be quietly killed.
It seems like there isn't much nMP stock anywhere, and prices are high for these outdated trashcans. This can only mean one thing: that it's either being manufactured in very low quantities, or that manufacturing may have stopped completely. Either way, at this point, I wouldn't buy one.
