8,-2/PICTUREAPPLEAPPLE TURNS PRO ҐAGAINґ
Apple neglects the Mac Pro for four years, and now says it’s working on
a new one. Why is it turning pro again?
@Y Alvin SoonApple did a very un-Apple-like thing recently. It
pre-announced a new Mac Pro and pro displays,
which won’t see the light of day until 2018. It did so
not from a polished stage presentation, but in a sit-
down conversation with select journalists. The unusual
disclosure was in response to increasing perceptions that
the company had abandoned the professional market,
with an aging Mac Pro that hadn’t been updated for four
years.
The numbers paint a clear picture about why Apple
discontinue the Mac Pro. The Mac is a US$25 billion
business for Apple annually, its computers ship at a ratio
of 80 percent notebooks to 20 percent desktops, and the
Mac Pro measures “a single-digit percent” of all Mac
sales. It’s a solid business, but it pales in comparison to
the iPhone, which brought in US$54 billion in the ï rst
quarter of Apple’s 2017 ï scal year alone.
It makes ï nancial sense for the company to put all of
its apples into the basket marked, “The money is here,”
and go all in on its ‘i’ products — which it seems to have
done in the past few years.
So why Apple’s turn of heart now?
We could imagine that it’s due to the growing
negativity from Apple’s pro users, who feel sidelined. The
vocal dissent from Apple’s most prominent and loyal fans
has created a perception that the company has lost, not
its way, but perhaps some of its street cred.
We could speculate that Apple realized it had to support
the developers who help make the App Store the most
successful app store on the planet; it’s estimated that
the store raked in US$28 billion in revenue for FY2016.
Xcode, the software development suite for iOS, only runs
on macOS, and developers need more computing muscle
than the current Mac range can provide.
All of this might be in play, as well as unsubstantiated
rumors that the backlash against last year’s redesigned
MacBook Pro, which was pretty but underpowered, gave
the pro-Mac Pro group inside Apple enough leverage to
ï nally get the go ahead for new machines.
What probably cemented the turnaround though, is that
Apple ï gured out a way to placate its professional users,
as well as create a business case for how to charge an arm
and a leg for it (this is Apple, after all). Even the lowest
possible single-digit percent of all Mac sales, at one
percent of US$25 billion, is still a US$250 million annual
business for the Mac Pro, which isn’t bad.
That’s the cynical part of me talking, but as part of
the creative community, I’m heartened to see Apple
turning pro (again). Before Apple ascended to the czar of
consumer cool, it was the underdog of choice for creative
professionals, who loved the Mac for its better design and
usability. It’d looked like Apple was divorcing its original
devotees, but it seems they’re back in the game.A HOT THERMAL CORNER
Phil Schiller famously announced the cylindrical Mac Pro
with the line, “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass.” That line
has come back to bite Apple, as the company revealed
that its triangular internals was designed to cool two
GPUs in tandem, but couldn’t handle a single, massively
powerful GPU getting super hot on one side — backing
the Mac Pro into “a thermal corner” it couldn’t get out of.4 HWM | MAY 2017