RIP Mac Pro

Here to tell us what's going to take its place is Phil Schiller. Phil, — I get to be the very first one to introduce all of you to the brand new Mac Pro. This is the Mac that so many of our highest end customers have dreamed of. The end of an era. Quite poetically, the Mac Pro was introduced as the final Mac to transition to Intel processors 20 years ago. It replaced the Power Mac that Steve Jobs originally introduced, which kind of shook the industry norms for Apple because it was the first Mac that they intentionally made from the ground up to be easy to upgrade and work on yourself. That carried through even with the cheese grater that so many people fell in love with. And when Phil Schiller first introduced the Mac Pro, he was proud to brag about how it was more affordable than a similarly speced Dell option. And they seemed very intentional about fighting the myth that Apple computers are more expensive than their PC counterparts. A lot changed since 2006, of course, with both leadership and Apple's product direction, but it's safe to say the Mac Pro, I think from the beginning, was ultimately designed and optimized for Intel. Yes, they did introduce about 7 years later the community named Trash Can Mac Pro, which was definitely not as upgradable and was more built to fit on your desk rather than under it. But it's safe to say this was not a very popular configuration and it kind of lost that original core audience that the Mac Pro was aimed for. people who were happy to upgrade their machines over time, customize them to their exact needs, and people got a lot of push back for that Mac Pro. Again, Phil Schiller introducing the radical new design. But of course, after many years of negative feedback, they actually brought back that traditional cheese grater approach with another emphasis on modularity and upgradability alongside the Pro Display XDR, which is Apple's least depreciating product of all time. But I think it's safe to say with Phil Schiller stepping down, the transition to Apple silicon, and John Turnis taking over more and more of the Mac hardware division, the Cheese Crater Mac Pro didn't really stand a chance against modern ARM technology. A lot of people kept wondering what a redesigned Mac Pro would look like for the Apple Silicon era. If you weren't optimizing for Intel processors and the x86 days, what would a new Mac Pro look like? And I think we really got our answer. It just wasn't called the Mac Pro. Of course, it's the Mac Studio. This is the highestend desktop grade machine that you can get. And the truth is, when you're trying to design an entire system on a chip, both with unified memory, CPUs, GPUs, and neural engines, and you want it to run as efficiently as possible, not just for lower power consumption, but also to manage heat better. that doesn't really work with that original 2006 Mac Pro vision of a customizable box that you slide under your desk and can open up and work on. Those two ideologies are kind of conflicting. And I think Apple kind of admitted and knew for quite some time now that ARM is the future. That's what they've been using on their iPhones basically since the beginning. And then the chips got faster and faster, good enough to put in iPads. And then the iPad started outperforming the Mac. So, of course, it was only a matter of time before Apple transitioned the entire Mac line to Apple silicon. And while yes, the Mac Pro hung out with the ARM chips for a little bit longer, it was safe to say that the modularity wasn't really all there. It was really only good for some networking cards and maybe some additional storage options. But for the most part, all of those features that people appreciated about the older Mac Pro being able to upgrade, whether it be the GPU, the memory, or even the CPU those days were kind of just gone. Making that giant cheese grater of a brick kind of a difficult justification because it cost far more than the Mac Studio and frankly didn't offer that much more performance. It was this beautifully designed cooling system that was designed to move so much air silently to cool down an inefficient dated Intel processor and an external discrete GPU. And we just don't really have those anymore. And frankly, I don't think there was really a way for Apple to upgrade the Mac Pro in any direction that wouldn't have just been a Mac Studio, which already exists. So, I don't think many of us are truly surprised by this announcement, but it's worth talking about the legacy, similar to when Apple discontinued the iPod. But I will say they made quite a bit more fuss about that decision than this one. I mean, there was a newsroom post saying the music will live on, you know, through the iPhone and through Apple Music. Apple could not care less about

the discontinuation of the Mac Pro. There was no newsroom announcement. There was no while supplies last or anything like that. It is just straight up gone, nuked from the websites. They don't have any kind of warning saying like, "Oh, these are available while supplies last. " That's what they did with the iPod Touch before discontinuing it. But they even make it pretty hard to find on the compare page and they don't even say it's available from authorized resellers. They kind of buried this thing quickly and they're not running out the red carpet for this as much as they did for the iPod, which maybe is understandable considering the iPod had been around a lot longer and it was a much bigger part of their overall history. But still, it does mark the end of an era, you know, some of the most expensive Apple products in history. Even though the Mac Pro did start at $2500 back in 2006, which sounds a lot more reasonable today, but factoring in for inflation, it's still quite a bit. But also, I'll still never forget how the 2019 Mac Pro could be configured up to 1. 5 terb of memory. Something still not available on the Mac Studio, but maybe with unified memory, it's just not necessary anymore. And some of those trims went well over $50,000. So maybe it's quite appropriate that with the introduction of the cheapest Mac ever, the MacBook Neo, within that same month, we're now seeing the discontinuation of Apple's most expensive product of any kind, ever. Are there still any Mac Pro users watching these kinds of videos? Comment below your favorite Mac Pro model. Do you still use them as a table stand? it as a trash can? Going to be hard to replicate those everyday item props with the Mac Studio. It's just kind of a brick. But drop all those thoughts down in the comments below. And thank you to everybody supporting this channel directly. Seriously helps us out a ton as does just watching these videos. So thanks again. This is Real Sheeper. I'll see you all in the next one.