Nearly 2 years from the release of the last Mac Pro, the question on the minds of most Mac geeks; will Apple kill the Mac Pro?
I don’t think Apple can kill the Mac Pro, however that doesn’t mean they will not due it. There used to be a plethora of reasons that a professional needed to buy A Mac Pro. Today those reasons are becoming less and less.
Professional Power
Let’s face it, technology is pretty freaking amazing. Today’s Mac’s are really fast, so the speed advantage that the Mac Pro used to provide is not necessarily in demand at all.
Expandability
Thunderbolt. Yeah, that’s what Apple would like. Lets be realistic. Thunderbolt is expensive and the current selection of Thunderbolt devices suck, although they are getting better. Still no viable or good storage solutions other than the Promise array and SSD base bus powered units. The rest of the storage out there is a joke. These manufactures aren’t listing to what users want and what they will use. This is a really big problem. AJA is leading the charge with some cool and innovative Thunderbolt devices, and some expansion chassis will aid in the transition. Thunderbolt is only 10Gbits, that is not all that fast, PCIe was up 16x speed, and Thunderbolt allows for only 4x.
GPU Power
Even though the GPUs that are getting put in the current Macs are powerful, they don’t compare to the power that you can add to the Mac Pro.
Professional Features
As of right now there are several professional features that are featured in the Mac Pro that would be sorely missed. Space for 4 Drives, 2 Ethernet ports, High Power GPU and Server Grad Processors. Stuff that will not be missed. Optical Bay, 2nd Optical Bay. So can Apple create a Mac Pro that will deliver?
Video Pro are not the only ones that need this power, but the demand is less and less. And with Apple clearly focusing and making more and more money form the iOS based hardware, it seems less and less likely that they will keep making professional grade products. We’ve already seen the XServe die. But remember Apple is still selling Sever based Mac mini’s and Mac Pros.
So why can’t Apple kill the Mac Pro. Content creation. They can’t sell the iPhone or iPad without desirable content. This means that developers and content creators need the extra horsepower of a Mac Pro, no mater what form it may be in. Lets also consider cloud computing. While the user don’t need the extra hardware, the cloud does.
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