Apple hasn’t been paying much attention to its pro users lately, and the company finally seems to be owning up to it.
Speaking to a small gathering of news outlets yesterday, including BuzzFeed, TechCrunch, and Daring Fireball, Apple acknowledged that it had been a while since the company put a focus on pro desktops, announced minor spec updates to the existing Mac Pro, and said that a new Mac Pro model is in the works.
But perhaps most importantly, Apple admitted that its flashy 2013 Mac Pro redesign was a mistake, and executives indicated that Apple intends to better support its professional users in the future.
“I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will,” one of Apple’s top executives reportedly said.
The small, trash can-shaped Mac Pro — which Apple marketing VP Phil Schiller once touted as evidence that the company could still innovate — was designed to fit two smaller graphics chips, but the industry didn’t move in that direction.
“Being able to put larger single GPUs required a different system architecture and more thermal capacity than that system was designed to accommodate,” the exec is reported as saying. “So it became fairly difficult to adjust.”
That seems to explain why the Mac Pro, until today, went more than three years without spec refresh — an entirely unworkable situation for pro users who need top-of-the-line hardware.
Schiller told reporters that the Mac Pro’s thermal issues “restricted our ability to upgrade it” and that Apple is “sorry to disappoint customers who wanted that.”
While Apple clearly wants to focus on the future, the fact that it called together a small group of media to discuss the state of the Mac Pro — without having anything truly new to show just yet — is telling of what this meeting was really for: an apology, and an early attempt at restoring trust with Apple’s most demanding customers.
Apple’s pro users have felt increasingly alienated and underserved. Apple hadn’t only ignored the Mac Pro for three years, it had barely mentioned the computer.
At the same time, Apple’s pro software has increasingly felt like an afterthought — with the widely maligned release of Final Cut X and the discontinuation of Aperture, it may as well have handed pro photo and video editors to Adobe. And the company’s only other recent Pro hardware release, the MacBook Pro, disappointed on power and expandability.
That’s what really brought pro users to a fever pitch. Toward the end of 2016, Apple started seeing complaints from even its most loyal defenders and skepticism from pro users that it would ever offer products for them again. (Its response, at the time, was to discount some dongles.)
Mac developer Michael Tsai has kept up an extensive and long-running list of complaints about the new MacBook Pros and the state of pro Macs, which includes more than three dozen updates since October. The complaints have been scathing: it isn’t just that people take issue with the MacBook Pro, its that pro users feel altogether rejected by Apple.
Apple could have continued to ignore this — it’s rare that the company goes public with its plans for future products — but evidently, executives felt they couldn’t wait. That may be because there’s still no firm date for when Apple will have new hardware ready for pro users: “pro” iMacs are promised for later this year, but the redesigned Mac Pro isn’t getting released until next year or beyond. That’s another year to go without a Mac Pro update.
By going public with this information now, Apple can at least quell concerns that it’s decided to ignore the pro market entirely — something that seemed plausible enough. TechCrunch and Daring Fireball report Apple saying that the Mac Pro represents only a “single-digit percent” of total Mac sales. And given that Mac sales account for only 10 percent of Apple’s revenue as a whole, it’s hard to imagine the Mac Pro is a particularly profitable investment.
While it’ll take more than a single press junket and a few somewhat-apologetic quotes to really prove to pro users that Apple cares about them, today’s announcement could at least keep the company’s computers in the running for any user thinking about jumping ship during an upcoming upgrade.
Although pro users may be a minority of Apple’s buyers, Apple’s focus on pros is important for its consumer line, too. It isn’t even that innovations Apple develops higher up could work their way down the line later on — it’s that Apple needs pro users to give the Mac its reputation. It’s pro users who make Macs known as the go-to computers for creative work. And if Apple lets all those users go, PCs may start to pick up the mantle.
Comments
Give us some proper GPU power please.
By PhatDummy on 04.04.17 10:40am
20+ year Mac user here and their lack of GPU power pushed me to buy my first PC last year. I’m not sure I’ll be going back.
By dcent1 on 04.04.17 10:57am
I feel bad for you, win 7 was the heyday of pc to me, windows 10 still feels off other than start up speed.
By enlight10ment on 04.04.17 11:46am
Just an FYI regarding startup speed of Windows 10. On Windows 8 & 10 Microsoft essentially changed what used to be the old shutdown into Hibernate (from Win 7), so it starts up much faster.
By SasparillaFizz on 04.04.17 11:53am
That’s so incorrect it’s not even funny… All they did was hide hibernate from the default power menu. You can re-enable hibernate by looking at your power management settings and clicking a checkbox.
By elindalyne on 04.04.17 12:12pm
To expand, in addition to general optimization, they moved a lot of the startup routine around, so tasks that previously would happen before the login screen now happen in the background after you start using it.
By ench on 04.04.17 12:26pm
on modern hardware with some reasonable parralelization (who uses a single core anything anymore?) it makes a lot of sense. get the user to the desktop and working in 5 seconds is more important than ensuring that the system is at 100% ready.
By Sprawlie on 04.04.17 9:15pm
Yeah, they tried the same thing back with Win 98 I think (or was it SE?), but all it meant at the time was you had to wait 10 minutes after logging in to actually use the damn computer.
By ench on 04.05.17 11:12am
Actually, he’s not completely wrong. Windows 8 and 10 use something called Fast Boot/Startup which is equivalent to hibernating the computer after you log off. It even asks devices drivers that support it to go into hibernate mode, in exactly the same way that they would if you hibernate manually.
https://www.howtogeek.com/243901/the-pros-and-cons-of-windows-10s-fast-startup-mode/
By ticker47 on 04.04.17 12:28pm
Nope… Fast Startup isn’t the same as hibernation. It has elements of Hibernation, but it’s not the same. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/jj835779(v=vs.85).aspx
By elindalyne on 04.04.17 12:51pm
That link says exactly what ticker47 said (they never said the two were the same)…
By op12 on 04.04.17 1:31pm
For all intents and purposes, they are essentially the same to the end user — neither performs a clean shutdown. For example, with "fast boot" on, if you turn off your PC and unplug the harddrive and plug it into another machine, that disk is not going to mount cleanly because the file system caches were not flushed. If you then change some files on the disk and plug it back into the original PC, lol and behold, you’re going to be in a whole world of hurt because "fast boot" is going to load in the old file system cache which is now inconsistent with the actual contents of the disk.
Honestly, the braindeadacity of their decision to just completely alter the semantics of such a fundamental concept as "shutdown", without so much as a warning, is truly mind-boggling.
By sadboyzz on 04.04.17 11:20pm
Try it. Really, try it.
Fast boot is not THAT stupid – it does detect that a filesystem has been mounted and changed externally and falls back to regular boot. You can corrupt the boot sequence only by intentionally directly writing to files, bypassing the usual NTFS journalling.
By Cyberax on 04.05.17 2:38am
Honest question here as a long time Mac user. Do PC users shut down their computers often? I always hear PC web sites and YouTube vids talking about boot time as being a going concern, but besides maybe a monthly software update, I haven’t shut down a Mac in years.
By mobile_phoney on 04.04.17 11:00pm
It’s not a Mac/PC thing. That’s been a computer debate for as long as I can remember. Basically both sides think they’re right for reasons they can’t prove. Fun stuff.
Modern computers are reliable enough to last either way. With Windows I think it installs major updates when you shut them off though. Of course in your case you racked up quite the electric bill over the years
By iamantman on 04.05.17 12:55am
I’m a PC user (since 1993), and I can’t remember the last time I shut down.
I have never understood this obsession with boot time. The time I actually wait for my computer to boot is maybe 1 minute out of the entire year. (I might have to reboot three times a year while physically sitting in front of the computer.) It could take 5 minutes for all I care, as long as the OS is fast once I’m into it.
By badasscat1 on 04.05.17 2:17am
Just because you don’t see a need for faster boot times doesn’t mean those of us that bank on it shouldn’t need it.
By Jerod on 04.05.17 1:59pm
I shut down my PC every night. Why not when it only takes about 15-20 secs from cold boot.
By Skie77 on 04.05.17 2:24am
I’m using PCs since 1993, I shut them down every night. They used to boot up in around a minute. But since SSDs are commercially available, the boot time takes just a few seconds. I have a habit of pressing the button, sit down on my chair and take my watch off my wrist, by the time I do that, Windows is fully loaded.
By Edd Grs on 04.05.17 3:51am
I can’t recall when I last shutdown or rebooted my desktop PC. Sleep and resume with incredible stability.
By NewWorldOrder on 04.05.17 4:02am
Once you wake up to the smell of a burning power supply that will change your tune pretty quick. I always shut down while sleeping. And with a SSD I’m up in like 23 seconds.
By Chris Darnell on 04.05.17 7:34am
I used to with my desktop because it was quick to boot back up. When I moved to a laptop I just configured Windows so that closing the lid made it go to sleep and if it was sleep for more than an hour it would hibernate.
That way if I’m opening and closing the laptop with any frequency then it’ll resume instantly. As soon as I stop using the laptop for a longer period, it hibernates and I don’t drain my battery (at the expense of an ever-so-slightly longer start up time).
By mrsilver on 04.05.17 4:39am
Shutdown every night because why should I waste energy when I don’t use the machine?
By Rivr on 04.05.17 5:54am
The difference between S3 sleep and shutdown without unplugging the PC as well is so minuscule you would need to leave the PC in S3 sleep for decades before you started noticing a difference in energy usage.
By Entegy on 04.05.17 5:27pm
I have a multiway connector with a power switch to completely disconnect everything on the PC from the plug over night.
By Rivr on 04.06.17 12:07pm