“2016 ended with a spreading school of thought that Apple was about to abandon the Mac Pro and Mac mini because sales for each are anemic,” Dave Farrington writes for NoodleMac. “Apple does not break out Mac sales units, but upwards of 75-percent of all Macs sold– according to Apple– are notebooks. That leaves the three desktop models– including the iMacs– as the smaller percentage of Apple’s overall Mac sales.”
“Strangely enough, the Mac Pro remains the most customizable Mac, and the most personal of Apple’s personal computers,” Farrington writes. “The most personal? How is that possible? Three words: Build. To. Order.”
“How much faster and upgradeable will Mac Pro 2017 be than Mac Pro 2016? I say nominally, and maybe that’s why Apple hasn’t moved the bar forward because there’s not much to move,” Farrington writes. “Recent versions of Intel’s Xeon CPUs are not leaps and bounds faster than previous versions. USB-C doesn’t raise the speed bar, though the seldom used Thunderbolt 3 may help with peripherals. How much faster in real world usage is whatever new crop of GPUs Apple could use? Geez, the Mac Pro can drive three Retina 5k displays now. How many do you need?”
Farrington writes, “I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the Mac Pro and Apple wouldn’t need to do much to make it a better seller than to upgrade the CPUs, the GPUs, the storage, increase and upgrade the ports, and get competitive with the price tag.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Even at over three years old, the Mac Pro is still a beast, yet Apple needs to lead the way, not follow. We’re optimistic that the Mac Pro conundrum gets solved this year.