Post #1146318

2026-03-30 12:30 UTC

It never made sense to me that the Mac Pro “had” to change away from this general design. A well-designed computer can be respected as art, but its primary purpose is still to be a computer. An all-in-one box that can be thrown in the car between gigs. Just plug in a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and your audio inputs, cameras, whatever it is you do with it. No fiddly external devices needed. The only complaints I ever heard are that it’s a bit heavy and the handles dig into your hands. Post-Steve Jobs comeback Apple was able to pull off making their towers an art piece *and* a functional workhorse. Why did Tim Cook-era Apple overlook and fail to make this balance? They killed the market for the product and only just started to win some of those customers back with Apple Silicon, but not without making a mess of the driver infrastructure, and making discrete GPUs impossible. This is after they broke the cadence of yearly Mac Pro refreshes to make way for 6 years of the Thermal Corner™ cylinder model, making a bet (dual GPUs with custom cooling) that wasn’t that useful to its customers, and would overheat and die. Why spend more to invest in the Mac platform when Dell would love to sell you a boring Windows tower that’s unopinionated and does what you need? #apple #mac #macpro

Replies (6)

@Eggfreckles@mastodon.mit.edu 2026-03-30 12:35

@kirb

Open ##1396181
@HitokiriEric@defcon.social 2026-03-30 13:02

@kirb Honestly one of the underrated killers of desktop towers may have been the inability of slotted RAM to keep up with soldered RAM. Esoteric PCI cards were nice but most of the desires were upgradable RAM, upgradable GPUs, and lots of hard drives. Apple’s divorce from nvidia and their desire for unified memory killed the GPU upgrade, soldered RAM killed that upgrade, and thunderbolt made external hard drive enclosures about as effective as internal drives. I’m still going to miss it though. The ability to just buy a nice desktop tower for $2000 and upgrade it over time was great.

Open ##1396182
@lproven@social.vivaldi.net 2026-03-30 14:07

@kirb The same integration that makes the Apple Silicon Macs so fast is the thing that makes them non-expandable in the way that the older Mac Pro models were expandable. You _can't_ have it both ways. I tried to explain here: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/27/apples_last_tower_topples/

Open ##1396183
@mike@libertynode.net 2026-03-30 15:21

@kirb it’s a shame they’re too prideful to have admitted their thermal corner mistake sooner. I honestly think they could have just released a new Mac Pro with the old 2012 Mac Pro case before 2019 and everyone would have been fine with it.

Open ##1396193
@JPZ@mastodon.social 2026-03-30 16:41

@kirb I did this with my old G5 PPC Mac Pro. I had the audio card and stuff set up so I could just bring that with and hook up my mics to my DAW. Seemed so advanced and "professional" for me at the time! lol

Open ##1396194
@MacBalance@mstdn.games 2026-03-31 00:25

@kirb Honestly if they’d kept that base design and just iterated the internals it would have probably been viable for at least 20 years to the Mac Pro market that wants tasteful, but is also buying a tool they intend to use as hard as they can for at least 3 years. I actually miss the older G3 “fold open” case but admit the plastic wouldn’t age as well today as quality metal probably does.

Open ##1396195