Pity the Macintosh Pro.
Apple announced a lot of things Monday at its annual developer conference, but the 39-pound aluminum tower computer didn’t get any stage time with the people who run Apple.
Instead the Mac Pro got a minor processor upgrade and a comment from an unnamed Apple executive to New York Times columnist David Pogue that new designs are 'under way.'
The machine hasn't gotten a substantial upgrade since 2010. And that’s made its friends -- including one of the men who invented the Macintosh -- upset:
Marco Armendt, the creator of Instapaper and former lead developer for Tumblr...
After two years, the Mac Pro was “updated” today, sort of: now we can choose slightly faster two-year-old CPUs at the top end, and the other two-year-old CPU options are cheaper now.
That’s about it.
No Xeon E5 CPUs, no USB 3, no Thunderbolt. They’re even shipping the same two-year-old graphics cards. Same motherboard, slightly different CPU options from 2010. That’s it.
The message is clear: Apple doesn’t give a shit about the Mac Pro.
Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the original Mac development team, is shocked...
When they didn't mention the Mac Pro during the keynote presentation, I got worried but figured they'd update it anyway, it just wasn't worthy of mention from the high pulpit of the consumer-oriented keynote. And sure enough, when I visited store.apple.com, there was a little "new" icon above the Mac Pro. But I was in for a shock when I clicked on the link to check it out.
The specs for the "new" Mac Pro had hardly changed, except for a tiny, inconsequential processor clock bump. Still no Thunderbolt, still no USB 3.0, no SATA III or RAM speed improvements - it seems like it's stuck in time in 2010. The only thing that's still high-end about it is the bloated price.
Even though I'm well aware that Apple's future lies increasingly with mobile iOS-based devices, it still makes no sense to drop the ball on your high end desktop Mac so thoroughly, and to utterly disappoint your most loyal customers like yours truly. Why do an update at all if you hardly change anything? What's going on here?
Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. An unnamed Apple executive, however, tells New York Times columnist David Pogue that an update is coming...
Many Apple observers also wonder if Apple thinks that desktop computers are dead, since not a word was said about the iMac and Mac Pro. An executive did assure me, however, that new models and new designs are under way, probably for release in 2013.
