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Apple working on ‘completely rethought' Mac Pro and pro display

Apple working on ‘completely rethought' Mac Pro and pro display

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Mac Pro

Apple is finally talking about its plans to refresh its Mac Pro. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Apple’s Phil Schiller claims the company is “completely rethinking the Mac Pro” after its last refresh back in 2013. While Apple is currently building a new Mac Pro, it won’t arrive this year. Schiller says Apple is hard at work on a new Mac Pro system with a separate pro display, but it's not clear exactly when either will arrive. The team responsible for both have been told to take their time on designing the next Mac Pro, to avoid some of the design constraints of the existing model.

“We designed ourselves into a bit of a corner,” admits Apple’s Craig Federighi, who looks after software engineering and regularly appears on stage at Apple events to demonstrate OS improvements. “We wanted to do something bold and different. What we didn’t appreciate completely at the time was how we had so tailored that design to a specific vision that in the future we would find ourselves a bit boxed in — into a circular shape.”

Apple’s unusually honest admissions about the Mac Pro come at a time when the company is being accused of abandoning the Mac and macOS. Apple’s latest MacBook Pros debuted with a Touch Bar, but professionals have complained of poor battery life and not enough power and ports on the laptops. Apple famously unveiled its Mac Pro with some classic bravado, with Schiller stating “can’t innovate any more, my ass,” but it seems we’ll be waiting another year until we see Apple’s next true innovation for the Mac Pro.

Until then, Apple is refreshing its current Mac Pro with a minor power boost. For $2,999 you can now purchase a Mac Pro with a 6-core Intel Xeon processor, dual AMD FirePro D500s, and 16GB of RAM. While the $3,999 model will include an 8-core Xeon processor and dual AMD FirePro D700s.