Granted, I’ve got a relatively “recent” Apple box, so I can afford to wait and see as my current equipment can keep up with the needs of my current clientele.
So long as the assembly line is cranking out new Mac Pros, no matter how creaky they are, I’m inclined to believe that there’s something on the horizon. When it was announced that the Xserve was no more, Apple blew out the stock and took the product off their storefront. After all, Apple isn’t shy about pulling the plug on things.
I’m not quite willing to believe that the Mac Pro is dead to Apple. Whatever they call it, the users will decide whether it’s a legitimate upgrade, voting with their wallets.Īs I said on Twitter last night, if Apple releases a new machine that affordably does what I need, high-bandwidth data transfer among multiple high-end GPUs, with lots of RAM, fast CPUs, and access to suitable pro-video interfaces and accelerated storage, then I don’t care what they call the thing or what it looks like. And they may call it a Mac Pro, or they may not. If someone put a gun to my head and forced me to make a bet, I would guess that Apple will most likely release something that they think will serve users in the Mac Pro market. I’ve long been saying to friends that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Apple rethought the overall form factor in some dramatic way, but that’s not exactly an original thought either. I might venture to guess that Apple is waiting for next gen Thunderbolt, but that’s hardly an original stroke of genius on my part since it’s the only machine in the lineup that’s lacking the new port. And so, all of us who are still Mac Pro based shops continue to wait. So what do I think Apple’s going to do?
And clearly, updating to PCIe 3.0 hasn’t been a priority (yet). Apple was obviously not waiting for next generation FireWire, they went all in on Thunderbolt.
My speculations in that prior post are now woefully dated, and I have no problem admitting that I was completely wrong. Little had I realized I’d be parked on that machine for the next two years. Since I had just moved the client part of my color correction practice over to DaVinci Resolve, I needed a new machine for the suite, so I went ahead and bought the 2010 Mac Pro later that summer. However, friend and colleague Patrick Inhofer noticed a blog entry of mine dating from the summer of 2010, fully two years ago this month, in which I foolishly elected to weigh in on the topic in response to Apple’s second to last, somewhat weak refresh of the Mac Pro line. I wasn’t going to chime in on this ongoing conversation, as frankly I don’t know that I have anything meaningful to add, and there’s nothing worse then baseless speculation about Apple.