Marco.org

For years, geeks have wanted Apple to make an “xMac”: an expandable desktop tower like the Mac Pro, but much cheaper, generally achieved in theory by using consumer-class CPUs and motherboards instead of Intel’s expensive, server-grade Xeon line. Apple’s refusal to release such a product is almost single-handedly responsible for the Hackintosh community.¹

Apple has shown that they don’t want to address this market, presumably because the margins are thin. And the demand probably isn’t as strong as geeks like to think: most businesses buy Windows PCs for their employees, and most consumers buy laptops for themselves. The relatively small group of people who still want desktop Macs seems to be served adequately by the iMac and Mac Mini.

With Apple now letting the Mac Pro stagnate without an update since August 2010, while the rest of the Mac line has seen multiple new generations and huge improvements since then, it seems like this just isn’t a segment that they care about anymore. The Mac Pro stagnation and the improvements in the other lines have pushed many former Mac Pro owners to the new iMacs and Retina MacBook Pros, which are so fast that they can compete with 2010’s Mac Pros.

The Mac Pro is all but forgotten now, but Dan Frakes restarted the discussion of the xMac this week, arguing for the next Mac Pro to be a consumer minitower:

Put all this together—Apple’s relentless efforts over the past few years to make everything smaller, cooler, and less power-hungry; the fact that you don’t need massive components to get good performance; and an apparent trend towards conceding the highest-end market—and it seems like a Mac minitower is a logical next step for the Mac Pro line.

I don’t think it’ll happen like this.

The Mac Pro has three problems:

• Many people who used to buy Mac Pros, a small but high-margin market, are now buying the cheaper, lower-margin consumer Macs instead because they’re advancing more quickly.
• A relatively small, unprofitable segment of the market wants a cheaper tower. They want it to be fast but cheap, small but expandable, and not just a Mac Mini.
• Both markets, which are already small, appear to be shrinking.

Back in 2011, I wrote Scaling down the Mac Pro. Most of it still applies: most ways to significantly reduce the Mac Pro’s cost or size would make it far less attractive to the people who do still buy it.

My conclusion in 2011:

It’s impossible to significantly change the Mac Pro without removing most of its need to exist.

But I think it’s clear, especially looking at Thunderbolt’s development recently, that Apple is in the middle of a transition away from needing the Mac Pro.

Fewer customers will choose Mac Pros as time goes on. Once that level drops below Apple’s threshold for viability or needing to care, the line will be discontinued.

I bet that time will be about two years from now: enough time for Apple to release one more generation with Thunderbolt and the new Sandy Bridge-based Xeon E5 CPUs in early 2012, giving the Mac Pro a full lifecycle to become even more irrelevant before they’re quietly removed from sale.

A few power users will complain, but most won’t care: by that time, most former Mac Pro customers will have already switched away.

It’s turning out to be even more brutal than I expected: Apple didn’t even bother with a Xeon E5 update.² It looks like they’re accelerating the Mac Pro’s demise by neglect, not preparing for its recovery.

There’s even less of a reason to buy the Mac Pro today than I expected. With Fusion Drive, an iMac can have 3 TB of storage that’s as fast as an SSD most of the time (for most use, including mine³) without any external drives. And the recent CPUs in the iMac and MacBook Pro are extremely competitive with the Mac Pro at a much lower cost.⁴

Coincidentally, the Mac Pro discontinuation date I predicted as two years from that post will be this November: that’s roughly when Tim Cook hinted that we should expect to see “something really great” for “pro customers” to address Mac Pro demand.

I really want that to be a great new Mac Pro, but I can’t deny that both Apple and the market are sending strong signals suggesting otherwise.

Desktop Retina displays are a wildcard. We can already observe from the Retina MacBook Pros that high-density LCD panels appear to be nearly ready for desktop sizes, but GPUs and video-cable interfaces (e.g. Thunderbolt) will be severely limiting factors. It’s possible that bringing Retina density to desktop-size displays without sucking will require the Mac Pro’s margins, thermal and power capacities, and horsepower for the first few years.

But Apple is patient, and building a Retina iMac might be significantly easier since it avoids the high-speed-video-cable problem. With Fusion Drive significantly improving disk speeds, high-end Thunderbolt A/V peripherals finally starting to appear, and so many pros already using Retina MacBook Pros and iMacs today, a Retina iMac would be a strong temptation for current Mac Pro users.

Maybe Cook’s “something really great for pro customers” is the Retina iMac. If so, as much as I hate to say it as a fan of expandable towers, that’s probably enough.