Make no mistake, this whole thing is absurd. We had the richest and maybe most sophisticated company on Earth essentially apologize for screwing up.
Just because Apple has cash money in their money pit doesn't Mac projects have a pragmatically limitless operating budget. That money is largely detached from yearly operational outlays for resources.
New or old Mac Pros neither one was going to substantively move the finance measurements needle for the overall corporation. Moving it for the even just the scope of the Mac business is unlikely also ( Over the years from 2012-2017 Mac unit and revenue numbers substantively grew. There is no huge strategic hit here. It is a nice to have area that they can afford to do. ).
That was a year and half ago. This wasn't the point Apple realized they f-ed up either. This was the point they acknowledged it to the public. Starting the 18-24 month clock at that point is silliness.
It isn't silliness. What is silly is not listening to what Apple says when they do talk.
"...
John Ternus ...
That’s when we realized we had to take a step back and completely re-architect what we’re doing and build something that enables us to do these quick, regular updates and keep it current and keep it state of the art, and also allow a little more in terms of adaptability to the different needs of the different pro customers.
Lance Ulanoff (Mashable): I’m just curious, at what point did you realize that? ...
Craig Federighi: I’d say longer than six months ago. But ....
...
At the same time, so many of our customers were moving to iMac that we saw a path to address many, many more of those that were finding themselves limited by Mac Pro through a next generation iMac. And really put a lot of our energy behind that.
.....
We did not fully come to terms with our need to do more until later than we’d like, with the implication that the next-generation Mac Pro ... customers want — until quite a while from now.
....
John Ternus ... We design something, it takes time for us to build the products we build, so it’s not so much about the CPU, it’s more about the overall system. ...
....
...
Phil Shiller ...
....Because the Mac has always been about that, it’s been about not doing conventional thinking, not ‘me too’ stuff. So the team certainly has been spending a lot of time with customers to understand what better would fit most workflows, to take the time to do something great, and something inspired and that we’re proud to put the name Macintosh on. ... "
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/t...-john-ternus-on-the-state-of-apples-pro-macs/
Unpacking that there were at least two responses that Apple embarked on when the Mac Pro 2013 design didn't max out with their expectations. One was the iMac Pro. There are a couple of hints at an upcoming iMac Pro in this transcript; the above is just one. After they started to finish up with that ( and probably also the scope of the eGPUs got more grounded) , that they were left with a much more well defined still empty block. It is probably at that point that they decided to move to Mac Pro. All of these Mac product take long cycles with deep overall balanced system design.
That "talking to" at the end was only going to get broader in scope after this "pow wow" discussion went out of "extremely private beta" to a much larger group. The amount of feedback they were getting problem went substantially up after this. ( we not necessarily higher signal to noise ratio so would need filtering. )
They probably had 6-12 lead time, at least, into knowing the nMP was just not going to work going forward.
Your presumption is that the next Mac Pro is the singular response to issues that the nMP had. It wasn't and isn't.
The other huge presumption is that Apple can work on 3-4 "next gen" Mac projects at a time. Again there is little evidence to back that up over the last 3-4 years. The mini , MBA , standard iMac , MBP have all had year or more windows with no updates. Whether the "something deserving of put the name Macintosh on" has become such heavy handed dogma that they don't want to do more than 1-2 Mac updates at a time or that they are just being more Scrooge McDuck and too "small team" focused it is not really a "pro users" thing. The mini was about as 'old dirt design' and they did not much with it either over last two years.
Maybe they scuttled the Mac Pro for a time, but clearly they picked it back up at some point before figuring out this sheet wasn't going to fly.
But were they done with the background and market scoping work? It wasn't like they had just one response how they would all fit together is also an ecosystem design issue.
I've been on Ubuntu workstations and sticking with MBPs since this stuff went south in 2012. That was more than 6 years ago guys....
Apple tends to put more resources into things that people are buying rather than things that people are not buying. Buying less Mac Pros and expecting Apple to move faster on Mac Pros doesn't match their standard behavior . I'm not saying folks can't "protest" by stop buying. Only that is not likely going to precipitate a timely response from Apple. Maybe for a product that was 10-20% of revenues, but for a 'nice to have' product it extremely likely won't lead to an expedient resolution. ( butterfly keyboards too how long to incrementally 'clean up'. about two years. Even at higher percentages it isn't super speedy. ). More likely what it will do is generate more internal discussion inside of Apple as to whether it really is a 'nice to have' product or not. That is far more likely to stall progress, not enable it.
Does Apple have 'forever' to put together a response? No. Blowing past 3 years will have some negative outcomes for them. They are aiming at a really narrow market and at some point it will get so small it won't be viable for a company Apple's size and overhead constraints to participate in. However, I think it is a mistake to presume was moving at "full speed" when this April 2017 meeting happened. They probably weren't. They knew for sure that it would
not be 2017. However, they were not confident enough to tag it definitely as a 2018 product ( as they did this year as a 2019 product). That doesn't sound anything at all like a company that had spent far more than 6 months a 100% speed. If they were more than halfway done schedule confidence would have been higher.
if they started around April 2017 and by April 2018 had high enough confidence to put a year range on it then that is probably closer to "halfway" (or more) in real time at "full speed" with the project. ( have had time to hit some milestones and see them tick off at expected rates ).
