“It’s looking increasingly likely that there will never be another Mac Pro,” Marco Arment writes for Marco.org.
“The 5K iMac is a truly great computer. It’s the best general-purpose desktop Apple has ever made. It almost replaces the need for the Mac Pro. Many of us can get by with the 5K iMac,” Arment writes. “But there are some things that only a Mac Pro can deliver.”
“If you need more performance for parallel workloads — very common for video, photography, 3D, science, medicine, and software development — the only way to jump meaningfully ahead of mainstream CPUs is to add more cores,” Arment writes. “Today’s Mac Pro-class Xeon CPUs easily pack 8 cores at pro-accessible prices, 10 or 16 for a bit more, and scale all the way up to 22 cores. It may take a decade for an iMac to match the speed of today’s 16-core Xeons.”
“The world has never seen anything like macOS, and nothing will truly replace it. If we’re forced to move to something else, it’ll be painfully, inescapably, perpetually worse,” Arment writes. “Keep the Mac Pro alive, Apple, so none of us have to make that choice.”
Read the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: If Apple loses the Mac professionals, they’ll have lost the plot.