> So what will happen? The same thing that happened with all of Apple's bad products- they'll continue to offer it for sale at incredibly high margins for eternity and never attempt to make it more competitive.
There's another thing Apple do with bad products, though. The original 13" Aluminum Macbook launched in November 2008. It was discontinued in June 2009, in favour of the 13" Macbook Pro, which offered a permanently built-in battery (the previous model had a removable battery), and dropped Firewire. That stayed on sale, subject to regular spec bumps, until October 2012, when they bumped the screen to a retina display ...
I'm not an insider, just a long-term Apple watcher (been using Macs since 1991): what seems to happen is they used to get an internal goal to fill a niche in the product range by a certain date, and if the performance target isn't quite achievable they ship whatever they've got -- then iterate on it, possibly with a model branding change.
The Mac Pro looks like a classic case of this: Tim Cook committed Apple to being 100% Apple Silicon across the range by the end of 2022, they missed, but they had to ship something to keep the Mac Pro brand alive. So they shipped a turkey (a Mac Studio with PCI slots and a higher price tag).
What happens next is: either they ship the real Apple Silicon Mac Pro in a year or two (with who-knows-what changes, but something to differentiate it from the top of the Mac Studio range other than price), or they admit defeat and kill the Pro range altogether, or maybe downgrade it to be the name of the top end Mac Studio.
But this model won't be available for more than two years, max.
> What happens next is: either they ship the real Apple Silicon Mac Pro in a year or two (with who-knows-what changes, but something to differentiate it from the top of the Mac Studio range other than price), or they admit defeat and kill the Pro range altogether, or maybe downgrade it to be the name of the top end Mac Studio.
There were a lot of rumors around a quad-chip (a ultra is just 2 M* Max's) that was 2 ultras fused together but the yields were terrible and they scrapped it. I've heard speculation that they might be trying again with M2/M3's but yeah, as it stands now the Mac Pro is very lack luster.
Honestly even if they manage a quad-chip design it's still missing things professionals want (more ram, more GPU power). I'm not at all in the market for this device but I really hope Apple pulls it off. Apple is better when it has devices spanning the whole spectrum even if the edges (low-end phone, high-end desktop) don't have blockbuster sales. You sweet spot of sales is empowered by those 2 extremes and benefits from it.
I think they can solve for more RAM pretty easily with the M3. Apple silicon is pretty dedicated to having the GPU cores integrated with shared memory though so I don’t see them offering graphics card options.
An M3 extreme which is 2 or even 4 M3 ultras sounds like it might be doable. M3 is already going to be a huge performence step because it’s a new process though.
Just checked on MacTracker -- yes, the 5,5 Pro had firewire; it's immediate predecessor was the Macbook (no pro) 5,1, which didn't have FW but had the removable battery -- the 5,5 added Firewire.
Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that aluminum Macbook (sans pro). I was working in a multimedia lab at the time and we were pretty dependent on firewire for student projects and putting the Macs into targeted disk mode.
There's another thing Apple do with bad products, though. The original 13" Aluminum Macbook launched in November 2008. It was discontinued in June 2009, in favour of the 13" Macbook Pro, which offered a permanently built-in battery (the previous model had a removable battery), and dropped Firewire. That stayed on sale, subject to regular spec bumps, until October 2012, when they bumped the screen to a retina display ...
I'm not an insider, just a long-term Apple watcher (been using Macs since 1991): what seems to happen is they used to get an internal goal to fill a niche in the product range by a certain date, and if the performance target isn't quite achievable they ship whatever they've got -- then iterate on it, possibly with a model branding change.
The Mac Pro looks like a classic case of this: Tim Cook committed Apple to being 100% Apple Silicon across the range by the end of 2022, they missed, but they had to ship something to keep the Mac Pro brand alive. So they shipped a turkey (a Mac Studio with PCI slots and a higher price tag).
What happens next is: either they ship the real Apple Silicon Mac Pro in a year or two (with who-knows-what changes, but something to differentiate it from the top of the Mac Studio range other than price), or they admit defeat and kill the Pro range altogether, or maybe downgrade it to be the name of the top end Mac Studio.
But this model won't be available for more than two years, max.