The Mac Pro is a cursed computer. It’s been cursed for nearly a decade, ever since Phil Schiller unveiled the cylindrical Mac Pro at WWDC 2013, loudly saying “We can’t innovate anymore, dammit!” A design that years later turned out to be wrong, due to a very serious thermal breakdown that prevented it from evolving.
Now here we are almost ten years later, at the gates of a 2022 Mac Pro with an Apple Silicon processor that puts an end to the 2019 Mac Pro, redesigned and with Intel Xeon processor. A team that, although it does not have a design error like its predecessor, is on the way to having an extremely short lifespan.
“We can’t innovate anymore, and damn it!”
At WWDC 2013, Phil Schiller said those words while still Apple’s vice president of worldwide marketing. The sentence should be framed after the death of Steve Jobs in 2011
However, things didn’t go as planned in Cupertino. Years later, Apple would recognize that the form of the Mac Pro did not follow its function. In other words, the 2013 Mac Pro’s thermal design failed:
I think we’re stuck in a thermal wedge, so to speak. We designed a system with the kind of GPU we thought we needed at the time, and we thought we could do just fine with a dual-GPU architecture. It was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But the workloads didn’t match up in the general way we’d hoped.
This is how Craig Federighi recognized in 2017 the Apple’s design error with the Mac Pro. It took several years for Apple to recognize this and even apologize to its users. And that’s because he was making a contingency plan to fix it using two teams: the iMac Pro which would debut later that year and the redesigned Mac Pro from 2019.
The original sin of the Mac Pro 2019
And finally, at the end of this year, the Mac Pro 2019 started its sale with the Pro Display XDR. A team that has brought together all the requests and wishes of the most professional Mac users: power, cooling, modularity. This last quality is in high demand, since it makes it easier to have highly configurable and long-lasting equipment.
The 2013 Mac Pro had a bug in its thermal design. And the 2019 Mac Pro was born with Intel, when a few months later Apple’s transition to silicon began
Despite these good decisions, hailed by the professional Mac community, this 2019 Mac Pro was born with an original sin called Intel. Nobody suspected that a few months later, Apple would announce its transition to Apple silicon. The one in which the company ensured that all of its teams would make the leap to the new architecture.
This includes the Mac Pro, as well as some doubted that the M1 could replace an Intel Xeon. The company itself has made it clear that the Mac Pro is for another day after announcing the Mac Studio a few days ago, with its M1 Ultra as the maximum exponent of Apple’s silicon. This powerful chip became the final nail in the coffin of Intel’s Mac Pro.
And so when Apple announces the 2022 Mac Pro presumably at WWDC 2022, the previous model you will see your value proposition greatly reduced. Except for users who need a workflow based on Intel’s x86 architecture and Windows. But the curse of the Mac Pro will be broken forever.