The trash can Mac Pro was a bet on the power of Thunderbolt, which for the first time was a peripheral bus fast enough to connect things like SSDs and GPUs with

The trash can Mac Pro was a bet on the power of Thunderbolt, which for the first time was a peripheral bus fast enough to connect things like SSDs and GPUs without loss of performance. The idea was to make upgrading even easier than the previous Mac Pro... as easy as plugging in a Thunderbolt cable. It didn’t work out that way. High performance Thunderbolt peripherals like eGPUs were slow to develop, for reasons outside of Apple’s control. They thought you’d soon be able to buy the latest GPUs in external enclosures as well as internal cards, the way you can hard drives. Didn’t happen. It’s a good example of a big bet from Apple that didn’t move the whole computer industry. Eventually Apple threw in the towel and went back to the traditional big box case for a pro machine.