“Apple has recently been sending out surveys to customers who purchased an iMac Pro, asking them about which features drew them to the pro-level machine and what they like or dislike about the iMac Pro,” Juli Clover reports for MacRumors.
“Some of the survey questions were shared on Twitter, with customers asked to point out some of the most important iMac Pro features, like Thunderbolt 3 ports, Xeon W processors, T2 chip, external display support, and more,” Clover reports. “Apple regularly sends out surveys of this nature to customers, but this line of questioning on the iMac Pro suggests Apple is perhaps trying to suss out key features that pro-level users want to see in future pro machines, such as the Mac Pro machine that’s in the works.”
“Apple has a dedicated team working on the Mac Pro, and Apple executives have said that Apple is committed to making the machine the highest-end desktop system able to handle VR and high-end cinema production,” Clover reports. “Apple has even put together a ‘Pro Workflow Team’ to tailor the Mac Pro and other Apple products to professional users, and that team could potentially be behind the iMac Pro survey.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Some people didn’t pay attention while attending Apple University, if they attended at all.
It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. — Steve Jobs
Regardless, tell them you don’t want anything glued or soldered in, please!
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s Mac Pro ‘cheese grater’ is 12 years old, and is the best Mac ever made – August 7, 2018
Apple’s 2013 Mac Pro, five years later – May 31, 2018
3 things to expect from Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro – April 11, 2018
Why can’t Apple keep their products up-to-date? – April 10, 2018
Why is it taking Apple so long to update the Mac Pro? – April 10, 2018
Apple’s latest announcements about the modular Mac Pro really ramp up expectations – April 6, 2018
Apple needs to stop promising new products and start delivering them – April 6, 2018
Apple: No new Mac Pro until 2019 – April 5, 2018
Apple reiterates they’re working on an all-new modular, upgradeable Mac Pro and a high-end pro display – December 14, 2017
Why Apple’s promise of a new ‘modular’ Mac Pro matters so much – April 6, 2017
Apple’s cheese grater Mac Pro was flexible, expandable, and powerful – imagine that – April 6, 2017
More about Apple’s Mac Pro – April 6, 2017
Apple’s desperate Mac Pro damage control message hints at a confused, divided company – April 6, 2017
Who has taken over at Apple? – April 5, 2017
Apple’s embarrassing Mac Pro mea culpa – April 4, 2017
Who’s going to buy a Mac Pro now? – April 4, 2017
Mac Pro: Why did it take Apple so long to wake up? – April 4, 2017
Apple sorry for what happened with the Mac Pro over the last 3+ years – namely, nothing – April 4, 2017
Apple to unveil ‘iMac Pro’ later this year; rethought, modular Mac Pro and Apple pro displays in the pipeline – April 4, 2017
Apple’s apparent antipathy towards the Mac prompts calls for macOS licensing – March 27, 2017
Why Apple’s new Mac Pro might never arrive – March 10, 2017
Dare we hold out hope for the Mac Pro? – March 1, 2017
Apple CEO Cook pledges support to pro users, says ‘we don’t like politics’ at Apple’s annual shareholders meeting – February 28, 2017
Yes, I just bought a ‘new’ Mac Pro (released on December 19, 2013 and never updated) – January 4, 2017
Attention, Tim Cook! Apple isn’t firing on all cylinders and you need to fix it – January 4, 2017
Rare video shows Steve Jobs warning Apple to focus less on profits and more on great products – December 23, 2016
Marco Arment: Apple’s Mac Pro is ‘very likely dead’ – December 20, 2016
How Tim Cook’s Apple alienated Mac loyalists – December 20, 2016
Lazy Apple. It’s not hard to imagine Steve Jobs asking, ‘What have you been doing for the last four years?’ – December 9, 2016
Rush Limbaugh: Is Apple losing their edge? – December 9, 2016
Apple may have finally gotten too big for its unusual corporate structure – November 28, 2016
Apple’s disgracefully outdated, utterly mismanaged Mac lineup is killing sales – October 13, 2016
“Apple has a dedicated team working on the Mac Pro, and Apple executives have said that Apple is committed to making the machine the highest-end desktop system able to handle VR and high-end cinema production,”
Waiting for the follow up 2019 Mac Pro disappointment shoe to drop on its introduction. With slack jawed pros looking on in disbelief. I’ll bet Phil Schiller doesn’t say “Can’t innovate my ass” this time.
Exactly.
So surveys went out to people who have bought Mac Pros? Since the Mac Pro selling for nearly five years has been the trashcan Mac, are they getting 99% of their responses from people who bought that horrible thing? Consequently are we going to end up with another trashcan Mac?
If Apple is just NOW trying to figure out the feature set for the next “Mac Pro” (in quotes since it will be called a “Mac Pro” but very likely won’t be) then in all likelihood we won’t see the 2019 Mac Pro shipping in quantity before nine months to a year from now. Apple should have nailed down that feature set before the infamous meeting well over a year ago where Apple execs told the media that they were indeed working on a new Mac Pro. Apple told people over 19 months ago that they had a new Mac Pro in the works. That was a LIE. They were just thinking about doing a Mac Pro someday in the future and had no real plans or designs in the works.
Clearly, Apple no longer has any idea what a true Mac Pro is. Apple should go to the design team and ask them what would be, in each of their opinions, the perfect professional Mac down to the thermodynamics, enclosure and ports. If they say anything even in close to the realm of the iMac Pro or the trashcan Mac, Apple should fire them on the spot. Then, with the few designers/engineers left, go build the Mac Pro for the future. Tell them they’ve got six months to go from a blank sheet of paper to having something ready for manufacturing or they’re all fired. Then give them every bit of management and financial support they need. Then finally get out of their way and let them get the job done.
As far as the Mac is concerned Apple has become Microsoft of nearly two decades ago. The trashcan Mac is the Windows Millennium Edition of Macs.
Or the design no one was asking for – the unsuccessful Power Mac G4 Cube, pioneered by Steve Jobs in 2000. The 2013 Mac Pro seems to be the equal clueless direct descendant of that unfortunate design thinking.
They may be asking pros NOW what they need but they obviously used hubris, ignorance and “we know better” as their starting point THEN to design the equally ghastly 2013 Trash Can Mac Pro. Sad when ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK and truly think of the ramifications of a poor deadend design. Sometimes, especially with pros who are a sharp bunch of cookies, the customer DOES know best. Adding to their crimes was the dreadfully slow realization they had messed up and slower turnaround to fix. But the verdict is out until we see if we get a worthy Mac Pro or something the Mac equivalent of the Simpson’s “Homer”.
They’re probably just getting a list of things people want so they can have flowery phrases for each one indicating why you REALLY don’t want it.
“trucks” will have indeed become obsolete.
All Apple ever needed to do was to update the cheese-grater Mac Pro to the latest industry hardware specs. It had everything that most pros needed, especially those four internal hard-drive bays and that modular processor tray. It had a spacious free flow cooling system. It even supported NVidia GPUs. Apple simply made a huge mistake with the trash-can Mac Pro. The cheese-grater Mac Pro was the equivalent of the best Windows PCs designs.
No one would ever ask for a cylindrical pro computer that used non-standard components. Such a waste of tooling for a dead-end design. I understand how the design was unique but it was also too unconventional for upgrading. Any pro computer that doesn’t use standard PCIe slots really doesn’t make any sense at all.
Apple absolutely must go back to something close to that cheese-grater Mac Pro design.
Apple likes to do things the hard overthought way instead of the way that makes the most sense in terms of what works for pro Macs. I don’t expect they’re going to really learn the dead-end, closed and un-upgradeable lessons of the 2013 Mac Pro and superior set-up in the Cheese Grater.
The next dead-end will be in sales of the 2019 Mac Pro for which they can then disingenuously say “Well, we gave it our all and no one wanted it. Cancel the Mac Pro!”
Yes, I too think that Apple ignores MacPro to force low sales volume used as pretext to disband the MacPro team to finally excise that anchor around its neck once and for all in favor of the limitless iPhone future.
Funny thing is if they licensed Macs to unbridled PC manufacturers I’ll bet sales would go through the roof to the detriment of Windows.
“…“Apple has a dedicated team working on the Mac Pro, and Apple executives have said that Apple is committed to making the machine the highest-end desktop system able to handle VR and high-end cinema production,” Clover reports. “Apple has even put together a ‘Pro Workflow Team’ to tailor the Mac Pro and other Apple products to professional users, and that team could potentially be behind the iMac Pro survey.”…”
Translation….
We are going to charge more for this than anything Apple has ever made before. Do not expect to touch the base system for less than $15,000. It will be designed around using Apple services for workflow purposes.
We plan on selling, maybe 6 of these. All to Elon Musk.
will obviously be electric, but there will also be a doobie rolling machine in the chassis.
It’s a bit late in the game at this point to be sending out a survey. Hello December 2019 for that 2019 Mac Pro to arrive LOL. I guess that’s why in four months now they haven’t fixed my Apple Watch they just keep telling me engineering is working on it me and about five hundred other people. Apple is getting to the point where they really can’t do anything right anymore. Damn shame.
How long are “old school” so-called professional computer/Mac user going to cling to older technologies claiming that is what a “professional” Mac has/needs to be?
With the rate at which technology progresses, a “professional” Mac may look and work very differently and may have very different and smaller and more powerful components in a much more compact and efficient design,than what current professional Mac users are, conventionally, describing from both the present and past.
The iMac Pro maybe a first step in this inevitable direction.
The scads of cards and bays in a huge metal and plastic enclosure with fans ans huge power supplies is quickly becoming obsolete and “old school” thinking.
The idea of a the Trash can Mac Pro and the ideas of a small modular and very powerful “Mac Mini” Pro is not really a far fetched one.
Yes it is. The majority of workstations used in the film and entertainment business are not trash canned sized machines but big boxes (unless a blade in a render farm) that can be adapted to purpose.
Someday maybe but Apple jumped the gun with the 2013 Mac Pro design by probably 10-15 years before the technology was ready. Also they were “stuck” with Thunderbolt 2 and so was any pro who bought one as opposed to the much more useful PCIe slots. A problem now with 4K, 6K and 8K video now popping up on top of VR. You need headroom in that bandwidth, especially with multi-streaming.
My opinion is that the 2013 Mac Pro “trash can” was purposefully designed to succeed the 2009 Mac Pro “cheese grater” as a workstation solution for all high-end users. Certain design assumptions later proved to be fatal – for one, that all high-end users would accept the rethink of peripherals, and for another, that sales would remain robust enough to support the continued production of custom components. By failing to design a unit that was readily upgradeable to the latest Intel offerings, the new Mac Pro’s intended audience rapidly lost interest. For once, Apple’s insistence on elegance, compactness, and ingenious engineering solutions to problems like heat dissipation faltered, and their investment in a new robotic assembly facility, situated in the US, became a sunk cost.
Here it is, already late 2018, and they are still trying to come up with a new solution to a uniquely-Apple problem: designing a sleek, slim, work of conceptual art that also outperforms the competition. It’s so sad, and a little perplexing, that they don’t simply focus on the second part, the only thing that really matters to these niche users. In trying overly hard to simultaneously please themselves and those they are trying to woo, they risk trashing the romance altogether.
Boy that was so eloquently put Herself! Well done.
Right on the money (or lack thereof for Apple’s current Mac Pro think).
Apple is like the story of the Scorpion & The Frog sinking in the river needlessly – because “it’s in their nature.”
“The scads of cards and bays in a huge metal and plastic enclosure with fans ans huge power supplies is quickly becoming obsolete and “old school” thinking.”
Someday maybe you will realize just how often “old school” thinking persists because of how often ‘it just works”
“The scads of cards and bays in a huge metal and plastic enclosure with fans ans huge power supplies” Just what I need! I have a cheesegrater Pro in the closet, would love nothing more than to drag it out and run the latest OSX on it.
If I am hauling something that requires a 747 Cargo, there is no substitute. A solar powered glider that struggles to carry the weight of the pilot when a cloud passes over is not going do it, even if it is fashionable.
Just goes to show, unlike good old yesteryears, Apple just cannot design anything without having to ask for opinion feedbacks from us poor souls.
Hope they don’t say “we now realized this was not what the market wanted” or some such, as happened recently on Mac/iOS convergence nonsense.
But when it’s all said and done, complete with outrageous pricing, I am sure Apple would say “you asked fo it”. There is nothing wrong with collecting consumer input, but Apple seem to have lost its soul to lead consumers than following. I remember certain forward thinking guy once resided in Apple used to say “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. What had happened to it, Apple?
“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”.
Oops, MDN already said it in their comment.
Two great minds think alike….
The cheese grater external box still looks out of this world, and continues to outshine Windows PC boxes but, design wise, is tired; still pined after for its utilitarian nature only by geeks and managers of Communist collective factories where drab is good enough for the proletariat. If it were up to geeks, they would be satisfied with a beige box. Thank God beige is gone.
So, being part of Western popular culture where the new intrigues and sells product, Apple must redesign it to keep people visually stimulated and buyers excited, and investors salivating; And innovating the exterior is one important aspect that garners it good, free publicity. But, as many have remarked, I would want all new, powerful as well as mostly swapable, replaceable, and some repairable components of course. But these last are obsolete trends; no longer employed even in automobiles where the headlight is replaceable in some cars by the headlight assembly instead. The exception is the swapable hard drive. It must return.
“mostly swapable, replaceable, and some repairable components ”
Not too concerned about “repairable” unless its very basic repair. I do not want to touch anything I do not know how to repair, and ending up paying so much to Apple.
But no soldered RAM and SSD etc please. For example, memories are commodity items and even very high quality ones from name brands are super cheap. Yet, Apple price them so high and I sometimes wonder if the bulk of profits Apple’s products actually comes from selling these built-in memories (for iPhone too). Apple is charging more than $3/Gb. Ridiculous!
And please do not seal the box, and even use Pentalobe security screws etc They are so in-your-face to show Apple’s greedy intention to protect their profit sources from otherwise extremely loyal customer bases. Give us some break Apple, wont you?
Yes, the sealed MacPro box would be a scam. The cheese grater MacPro could be opened elegantly, a true gem of a feature.
To hell with the auteur attitude at Apple! You can’t tell me it takes 5 years to reintroduce the Cheese Grater with maybe some slight new case flourishes.
Just update the Cheese Grater.
Ford doesn’t go around redesigning core functionality in the F-150 every few years. It is just a damn truck. Some products are like that. We don’t buy them to look stylish.
We mostly put Mac Pros under/beside the desk and then just expect them to silently work for years.
Maybe they ought to ask those of us who bought Cheesegraters and refused to buy that steaming pile of shit masquerading as a Mac Pro or the Black iMac.
The term Pro should never be attached to any computer that is glued shut and not designed for INTERNAL expansion by end users. Phil may dream of a Mac with no connections- I do not- and there are plenty in my tribe.
Pro users come in many forms. The needs of a Radiology Workstation running Osirix is different than a Movie editor or a graphic artist or a composer or an architect or a geodetic scientist or a meteorologist or an anthropologist.
What we all benefit from is a computer that accepts industry standard graphics cards and memory and does so internally- not a spaghetti bowl of cables and wall warts everywhere.
… or a 3D CAD product designer. — amen.
Or they could ask all the people that gave up on Mac and switched to Windows…
This toxic comment section gets one star.
I have an idea. Update the trash can with a new socket that allows you to plug in an auxiliary box much like the cheesegrater where a pro user can plug in anything they need or invent anything they need and plug in. The trash can Mac Pro can act as the interface unit into something much more powerful than currently exists. Even plug in a quantum machine if the pro user really needs it. I’m still waiting for that Star Trek holodeck to be invented.
I have a $7000+ iMac Pro model purchased in April and did not receive such a survey.