After the decidedly lackluster Mac Pro Update earlier this year, it has been popular to speculate that we are entering the final days of the Macintosh workstation. While this is certainly possible, I’d like to offer forth an alternative, rosier theory that would explain Apple’s current behavior.
It’s fair to say that if Apple were to have delivered a satisfactory update, the people who bought it surely would have expected their new machine to be reasonably future proof. After all, a Mac Pro is a large investment, and one of the benefits of a tower form-factor is it’s upgradability and corresponding long life. The Mac Pro release customers wanted, the one with thunderbolt and Sandy Bridge Xeons, would certainly have been held to this standard.
Right now Apple is in the mist of it’s biggest transition since PowerPc to x86: the transition to retina macs. They want it to be as fast and painless as possible, while leaving to fewest number of customers behind. One important piece in that transition will be their cinema display, which given it’s size will almost certainly be 4k resolution.
Here’s the thing: the current thunderbolt connector doesn’t support displays larger than 2560×1600; thunderbolt won’t get that ability until next year. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue because the Mac Pro has plenty of PCIe slots to accommodate new technology via third-party expansion cards. The problem is that thunderbolt PCIe cards don’t really exist; the only add-on cards require vendor specific motherboards as well as extremely wonky external connectors from an additional graphics card. Practically speaking the only way to get the new thunderbolt will be at the motherboard level, something that existing Mac Pro owners would never be able to do.
So Apple has a choice. On the one hand they could release a nice new Mac Pro this year and a retina display next year, which would obsolete the 2012 Mac Pro model and leave a lot of customers pissed off and stuck in the pre-retina era for years. On the other hand, they could do what they did and piss off everybody now, but leave fewer people stuck in the pre-retina era later, while making sure that the one’s that are were very well aware that they were buying a machine that was outdated and soon to be obsolete.
This seems like a trade worth making.
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