While some of last week’s rumors of new Apple hardware came true, other predicted updates were notably absent. Most frustrating to Mac power users and professionals is the lack of any meaningful upgrade to the Mac Pro towers. Despite earlier rumors of everything from a case redesign allowing rack mounting in a server rack to Intel’s Ivy Bridge chipset and Thunderbolt support, the only change Apple made was a small CPU speed increase (while still using the two-year-old Westmere generation of Xeon processors). This small change wasn’t even mentioned during the conference itself. Rather, Apple silently updated its website after the keynote speech ended.
Yesterday, Apple removed the “New!” stamp next to the Mac Pro product line on their website, indicating the company is aware of the backlash from the community. Even Andy Hertzfeld, the author of most of the code found in early versions of MacOS, described the Mac Pro update as a “tiny, inconsequential processor clock bump” and said that the “only thing that’s still high-end about it is the bloated price.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook replied to an email from one disgruntled Mac user (who signed his email as Franz), with the following comment.
Thanks for your email. Our Pro customers like you are really important to us. Although we didn’t have a chance to talk about a new Mac Pro at today’s event, don’t worry as we’re working on something really great for later next year. We also updated the current model today.
It now appears that Apple’s iMac will receive a major update later this year, before the Mac Pro is addressed in a meaningful way. New York Times columnist David Pogue recently wrote a claim of new iMacs scheduled for a 2013 release, and Apple has since corrected Pogue’s statement (indicating they’re probably coming sooner). All of this sends a message that Apple’s primary focus is on the typical consumer, not the high-end pro user, despite Tim Cook’s assertions to the contrary. The new MacBook Pro 15″ with its retina display looks like a great portable, but it’s hardly suitable as a file or application server.
The danger in making power users wait another year for a redesigned Mac Pro tower is the fact that many of them are the content creators. If they have outdated machines and need to upgrade today, these content creators can buy far more processing power for their dollar by switching to Windows PCs. Software developers on Windows are less likely to create Mac compatible versions of their software, which hurts the Mac environment as a whole.
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