And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And if Apple lets all those users go, PCs may start to pick up the mantle.ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. It’s pro users who make Macs known as the go-to computers for creative work.
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. 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.Īlthough pro users may be a minority of Apple’s buyers, Apple’s focus on pros is important for its consumer line, too.
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. TechCrunch and Daring Fireball report Apple saying that the Mac Pro represents only a “single-digit percent” of total Mac sales. That’s another year to go without a Mac Pro update.īy 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. 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. 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.Īpple 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. 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. (Its response, at the time, was to discount some dongles.)
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. That’s what really brought pro users to a fever pitch. And the company’s only other recent Pro hardware release, the MacBook Pro, disappointed on power and expandability.
Apple hadn’t only ignored the Mac Pro for three years, it had barely mentioned the computer.Īt 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. 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.Īpple’s pro users have felt increasingly alienated and underserved.
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.” 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. “So it became fairly difficult to adjust.” “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. 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. “I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will,” one of Apple’s top executives reportedly said. “Can't innovate anymore, my ass” has not aged well