While it is obvious that the 2013 "Trashcan" Mac Pro was not a successful design, it seems a lot of people don't get what Apple was going for. Their goal was a

While it is obvious that the 2013 "Trashcan" Mac Pro was not a successful design, it seems a lot of people don't get what Apple was going for. Their goal was a computer heavily focused on multithreaded and OpenCL loads, as most vendors were still preaching to developers that the single threaded performance increase ramp was dead, and workload would have to scale out instead. At the same time, it is quite easy to point to the Mac Pros before and after it and say that they have a lot of wasted power and space. The new Mac Pro design has a 1400W power supply and is mostly empty space to accommodate the "fully loaded" expansion options that most buyers quite frankly will not purchase. As Thunderbolt is basically an externalized PCIe interface, there is certainly a case to be made that extensibility is better served as a separate unit. This allowed the design of the core system to forgo modularity, and have an extremely compact design. This also allowed them to have a reduced parts cost. But the reality was: - Component thermals did not stay balanced, with GPUs using far more power and giving off far more heat on the high end. This meant that there was a shortage of pro-level parts usable without redoing the core design. - As Apple didn't upgrade the core design, it wound up having dated thunderbolt support. - There is certainly an argument to be made that extensibility within the case is a cleaner, more manageable design for the end user - Intel's licensing for Thunderbolt has been guarded, and thus the market has been sub-par. For example, eGPU took ages to become available. Another example - Intel forbid RAID assemblies to be sold without disks. In the end, I personally see what they were trying to go for, but in a lot of ways the way they thought technology and needs would evolve were missed by the 2013 pro. I don't see an issue with the design based on where they thought things were going - the issue IMHO is that it took them six years to react with a new product. (FWIW, I was planning to buy the second rev of the trashcan pro - which I slowly realized would never happen)