Well, there's going to be a major update of the Mac Pro this year, widely presumed to be something more than a mere upgrade of the internals. It's difficult to

Well, there's going to be a major update of the Mac Pro this year, widely presumed to be something more than a mere upgrade of the internals. It's difficult to explain the continued use of outdated chips over the past few years, especially after they discontinued the XServe and told everyone to use the Mac Pro instead. I suppose the Gruber-esque answer is that Apple (especially under Steve Jobs) wants to present an elegant vision of what computing should be, every product a work of art with considerable mass market appeal. The Mac Pro is basically indistinguishable from a bulky 90s tower PC, and very few people actually need it. It's a decidedly unsexy product. Apple is not Dell or Lenovo, they make very few products and they make a very big deal out of each one of them. The Mac Pro is an unfortunate necessity that they cannot reasonably discontinue. But it's not a product that Apple really wants to make.