Basic logic, and an understanding of manufacturing timelines is plenty to go off.
Indeed. And, strictly from a logical standpoint, the theory that Apple's PR was telling the truth STANDS TO REASON!
Granted, if you don't have that, sure you might believe a PR exercise designed to shape a narrative that Apple was failed by their technology partners (Intel & AMD) rather than the truth
Except, I don't believe that...?
- Apple's executives made a stupid decision to create a statement computer, because they are vain little men who were butthurt at people laughing at them, and they should probably have been on the receiving end of a shareholder lawsuit over it.
Won't debate that.
It is simply not a credible scenario to believe that the iMac Pro, an entirely novel design that shared almost nothing with the rest of their product range, had so much time and effort invested in it to be just a one off interim throwaway product.
The words in bold are a weird way of looking at it and I think that's largely what's shaping your take on the history here.
Also, your logic doesn't follow fully, but we'll get to that in a second.
It's not a throwaway product. Apple realized that a lot of users were using 27-inch iMacs to do workloads that became slower to do on aging Mac Pros because, at that point in time, the 27-inch iMac was the best Mac in the line-up from a purely performance perspective. Apple created a beast of a computer tailored to those folks. It was never meant to be anything more than that.
Now, here's why your logic makes zero sense. The 2019 Mac Pro had TONS of engineering work, effort, and R&D to go along with it. Apple could not have started working on that Mac any earlier than the point in time in which it was obvious that the design of the 2013 Mac Pro was not working out for people. Apple is stubborn, so you could safely assume that was at least late 2014, if not 2015. If your argument is that Apple had planned on doing away with the Mac Pro entirely (much like they seemed to be doing with all products with the "Air" moniker in them) in favor of the iMac Pro, that's an interesting take. But, even then, the timing wouldn't line up. Also, you forget that Apple will often scrap nearly-completed products if they've decided to pivot. So, the notion of them getting all the way to manufacturing (at which point they would've already had to have started on the 2019 Mac Pro) and then pivot doesn't line up well from a timing perspective.
Furthermore, anyone who knows anything about the T2 chip will know that it was a stopgap for Apple to provide the things that they really didn't want to wait for Apple Silicon to provide. Furthermore, Apple started planning on the switch around the time of Skylake (released in 2015 27-inch iMacs and 2016 MacBook Pros), which is around the time that Apple would've likely been working on the T2.
THEREFORE, the 2019 Mac Pro is no less of a one-time product than the iMac Pro. Certainly, Apple could (and should) largely reuse the 2019 design for the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, but even then, there will be no RAM slots and no discrete graphics card options. They have all but spelled this out verbatim. But it is very obvious that Apple started work on this Mac Pro after they already knew that it would likely be the last with Intel and that its successor would entail anywhere near from a moderate to severe redesign, whether that be internally, externally, or both.
They stuck with the butterfly keyboard, a known faulty product that trashed their reputation and resulted in huge class action payouts, for 3-4 years because they couldn't lose the ROI in an unplanned update to their multiyear tooling and designs any faster, but sure they designed a whole top of the range computer from scratch to be a single-generation "interim" product.
Apple's stubbornness wasn't in that they didn't want to make a single-generation "interim" product. But in that they thought that they could fix the flaws. And, to be fair, you never saw a single generation of butterfly keyboard on more than two consecutive releases. They finally gave up and released a tweaked design [that became the basis of the MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019), every 2020 model of 13-inch MacBook Pro, every 2020 model of MacBook Air, and the MacBook Pro (13-inch, M2, 2022), but even in that lineup, there were machines that only used that tweaked redesign once. If your argument is that Apple doesn't make single-generation products, well...there's history to prove you wrong.
A far simpler explanation, one that fits with the known timelines for Apple's product development, is that the 2013 Mac Pro showed itself to be a market, technology, and reliability failure right around when the 5k iMac was introduced (Oct 2014). At this time, Apple lacks a technology to do a non-janky connection for an external 5k display on a headless machine, so Apple's clearest strategy forward is to make a Pro version of the iMac, and replace the Mac Pro entirely. Nice clean desktop product range - Consumer iMac, Pro iMac. But then as the years of development on the iMac Pro pass, it becomes apparent that the criticism of the 2013 Mac Pro is primarily in comparison to the slotbox design of 2012 model. Given the iMac Pro is yet another iteration of Thunderbolt as a strategy, and Thunderbolt as a strategy is what the market largely rejected, a new slotbox design is rushed into production. This still takes over 2 years from when it's announced.
There are two holes in your theory (which, if I'm being perfectly honest, is otherwise quite good):
One is that the technology required to drive a non-janky connection to a 5K external display didn't take that long to materialize. They were not far off from it once the 2015 iMacs had arrived, if memory serves. They were when they were first engineering that first 5K 27-inch iMac, but that was much earlier.
Two, Apple didn't discontinue the 2013 Mac Pro when the iMac Pro came out. Nor did they scrap the iMac Pro when it was determined that it wouldn't be the thing to fit the needs of the folks that had problems with the 2013 Mac Pro. I'd totally buy that this was Apple's way of at least getting out of the thermal corners that they had earlier. But even then, they'd be completely foolish to think that it would be a viable long term solution when (a) it's still Thunderbolt as a strategy and (b) you're still trying to fit a workstation class Xeon and workstation-class AMD GPUs in a thermal envelope that has historically only been adequate enough for a consumer desktop processor and a gaming laptop GPU.
That and, again, this is the inaugural T2 Mac and it's clear that, by that point, Apple was going to make drastic changes to the machine anyway.
Again, if you want to believe that Apple intended to keep the Mac Pro as a product when they started planning and designing the iMac Pro, and that the iMac Pro was only intended to be an interim product, that's on you.
Again, it's not a bad theory. But the timing doesn't line up.
The concept of 6,1 was sound, but it was stupidly naive for Apple to think that they could dictate the market overnight when the 5,1 Mac Pro had already languished for some time.
Very succinct and well put!
This still doesn't make the concept of a tower archaic, but my point is that it is gradually becoming less of a requirement to achieve results many people want. Win-PCs have almost infinite PCIe support whereas the Mac does not. This is a fact whether sad or not, and Apple has to establish the value of this feature.
Also spot on! This recalls Steve Jobs' famous truck analogy. And yeah, for the most part, other than graphics cards, the vast majority of the things you'd want a card for rather than a USB-C and/or Thunderbolt 3/4 accessory for are high-end cards that you wouldn't need outside of serious professional settings. Case in point: I've known no one that needs a Mac Pro tower and can't get by with a later-year 5K 27-inch iMac, iMac Pro, or Mac Studio; but I do know plenty of businesses that need that Mac Pro.
And given that a Studio with the Ultra chip starts from $3,999, a Pro tower will surely start at $4,999 minimum, which like the Pro Display XDR will be targeting the highest end customers, not the hobbyists.
Extremely fair assessment. I'll even add that M1 Ultra based Mac Studios are also primarily targeting businesses and highest end customers. I don't know of anyone outside of a business that needs more than a maxed out M1 Max Mac Studio.
My prediction: the Mac Pro will have limited expansion, but also an 'Extreme' chip even if contrary to the latest report.
PCIe will stick around, but be incompatible with cards containing traditional GPUs. RAM slots won't. This much is pretty much all spelled out. I'm hoping the SoC will be socketed. And I'm in complete agreement that it won't be the same SoCs that you have in a Mac Studio and that it would be a higher end Apple SoC in its own class. Though, it wouldn't surprise me if, to keep the costs down, they offered options at the low end that are similar to the M1 Max or M1 Ultra just to lower the bar of entry. Separately from that, given that RAM and GPU expandability is a crucial element to the Mac Pro (and always has been) and is inherently not doable with the way they've designed Apple Silicon as a hardware platform, it wouldn't surprise me if they socketed the SoC and allowed for upgrades (albeit at a pretty penny).
