Where is that new Mac Pro model we’ve all been waiting for? It was supposed to be smaller and rack-mountable. As it turns out, it may be neither of those things. In fact, the Mac Pro may not exist for much longer.
From AppleInsider:
The consensus among sales executives for the Cupertino-based company was that the Mac Pro’s days — at least in its current form — were inevitably numbered. In particular, internal discussions were said to focus around the fact that sales of the high-end workstations to both consumers and enterprises have dropped off so considerably that the Mac Pro is no longer a particularly profitable operation for Apple.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mac Pro ended up being discontinued. I own one currently, and love it, but it’s cumbersome and gives off enough heat to heat my entire office in the dead of a Canadian winter. I purchased it because of it’s expandability, but clearly I was kidding myself. The 2009 Mac Pro that I have has only been upgraded once, this year, with new hard drives, and extra RAM. It’s not a consumer level machine, and the consumers who were purchasing them seem to be doing just fine with the latest iMac and MacBook Pro.
It’s sad, but the writing was on the wall when Apple discontinued their Xserve’s last year. Given the state of the cloud, Apple’s movements towards eliminating expandability (unibody anyone), and the amount of power that can be put into a smaller device like a Mac mini or iMac these days, it’s no wonder Apple’s viewing the Mac Pro as a dead-end product, should these rumors turn out to be true.
Professional’s will disagree, as they should, but most of us don’t need the power of a Mac Pro anymore. I edit podcasts and do some basic video editing, and I have a hard time seeing why I wouldn’t just spring for one of the new iMacs instead of a Mac Pro this time around. Most consumers are thinking the same way it seems, and Apple today, more than ever before, is a consumer electronics company.
