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High end desktops are a niche, a small but important one, and the MacPro was wildly successful... at first. There's a reason people complained about the lack o

High end desktops are a niche, a small but important one, and the MacPro was wildly successful... at first. There's a reason people complained about the lack of upgrades and it wasn't because no-one bought one. Your suggestion would be the most un-Apple thing I've heard. They never do stuff like that because they believe in their solution as being the best. They could have been right - that was the bet. What you describe is not a bet at all!

iainmerrick 10y ago
What you describe is not a bet at all! Of course it is! Not all bets have to be all-in. Having a backup plan would have reduced the downside if the Pro wasn't a hit. It would also add a little risk, sure, of being perceived as cowardly or unfocused by going for such an "un-Apple" approach. When a product like the Mac Pro is widely perceived as a failure, and you have to resort to the extremely un-Apple thing of discussing your future roadmap, it seems to me very reasonable to ask what might have been done differently, and why. I still say that if Apple had kept their eye on the ball, they would have known within a couple of years that the Mac Pro wasn't working as intended. They could and should have started work on a more modular replacement a year or two ago. It would have been shipping now and they wouldn't be in the embarrassing situation they're in. Wikipedia's summary seems fair: "By 2016, reviewers started to agree that the Mac Pro was lacking in functionality and power, and should be updated by Apple. Apple later revealed in 2017 that the thermal core design had limited the ability to upgrade the Mac Pro's GPUs and that a new design was under development, to be released in 2018 or 2019." Either it took them a year to figure out the problems with the current design and realize they needed to go back to the drawing board, or (I'm guessing) it was just allowed to languish and no serious investigation was done until fairly recently. (Take all this with a pinch of salt, of course! I'm a random internet pundit and not actually running one of the most successful businesses of all time.)

iainmerrick 10y ago

What you describe is not a bet at all! Of course it is! Not all bets have to be all-in. Having a backup plan would have reduced the downside if the Pro wasn't a hit. It would also add a little risk, sure, of being perceived as cowardly or unfocused by going for such an "un-Apple" approach. When a product like the Mac Pro is widely perceived as a failure, and you have to resort to the extremely un-Apple thing of discussing your future roadmap, it seems to me very reasonable to ask what might have been done differently, and why. I still say that if Apple had kept their eye on the ball, they would have known within a couple of years that the Mac Pro wasn't working as intended. They could and should have started work on a more modular replacement a year or two ago. It would have been shipping now and they wouldn't be in the embarrassing situation they're in. Wikipedia's summary seems fair: "By 2016, reviewers started to agree that the Mac Pro was lacking in functionality and power, and should be updated by Apple. Apple later revealed in 2017 that the thermal core design had limited the ability to upgrade the Mac Pro's GPUs and that a new design was under development, to be released in 2018 or 2019." Either it took them a year to figure out the problems with the current design and realize they needed to go back to the drawing board, or (I'm guessing) it was just allowed to languish and no serious investigation was done until fairly recently. (Take all this with a pinch of salt, of course! I'm a random internet pundit and not actually running one of the most successful businesses of all time.)