Apple's mea culpa about the Mac Pro this past week made it an easy target for media scolding.
Both the Mac Pro and MacBook Pro have been frequent targets. But bashing the Mac Pro piñata became everyone's favorite pastime this week.
The trigger was a meeting Apple executives Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi and John Ternus had with a small group of journalists (full transcript here courtesy of TechCrunch).
Phil Schiller even said "we're sorry" referring to "a pause in upgrades and updates." Craig Federighi focused on mistakes (via TechCrunch) that Apple has made.
I think it’s fair to say, part of why we’re talking today, is that the Mac Pro — the current vintage that we introduced — we wanted to do something bold and different. In retrospect, it didn’t well suit some of the people we were trying to reach. It’s good for some; it’s an amazingly quiet machine, it’s a beautiful machine. But it does not address the full range of customers we wanna reach with Mac Pro. . --Craig Federighi
Federighi added that Apple had designed itself "into a bit of a thermal corner...We designed a system that we thought with the kind of GPUs that at the time we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two GPU architecture…But workloads didn’t materialize to fit that as broadly as we hoped."
After those excerpts, and others, from the meeting were published, the daggers came out. The Verge said “Apple admits the Mac Pro was a mess,” and called the Mac Pro design “trash can-shaped.”
"The lack of updates on the Mac Pro made it obvious that this product was a flop," said MacWorld.
“The very fact that Apple felt compelled to hold [Monday's] meeting in the first place is evidence of just how much it thinks it screwed-up here,” said 9to5Mac.
Overall disenchantment with the Mac platform isn't hard to find. “I like to read Mac Forums…and for years, it was nothing but flying the flag and falling on the sword. These days though, even hardcore Mac addicts are saying Apple has forsaken us," Gordon Ung, Executive Editor at PC World, told me in an email.
And nothing really changed after some Mac Pro tweaks
Apple on Tuesday reshuffled the lineup, bringing down the price of Mac Pro configurations with faster chips. But there's nothing new about what Apple did. Essentially it just repriced some configurations, as pointed out by Apple enthusiast sites.
For example, the entry-level $2,999 Mac Pro model now has 6 Intel Xeon processor cores -- compared to 4 cores on the previous configuration – with dual AMD FirePro D500 graphics chips. And the $3,999 Mac Pro gets an 8-core Intel Xeon processor with dual AMD FirePro D700 graphics silicon.
