Marco.org

This Ars Technica article by Jacqui Cheng is interesting from the pros’ perspective, but the idea that the Mac Pro is being neglected is short-sighted:

The fact that the Mac Pro seems to be on Apple’s back burner is making professional users nervous and forcing them to begin looking at other—non-Mac—hardware solutions to ensure their future employability. …

With the current iteration of the Mac Pro about to turn 18 months old—and even at the time of that update, the previous version was nearly two years old—these users are becoming increasingly jaded about Apple’s commitment to the pro market.

Since the Mac Pro’s introduction in 2006, it has always followed the Xeon CPU roadmap. New Mac Pros are released when Intel releases new Xeon CPUs for them to use. That’s it. I’ve given away my secret on how to very accurately predict when the Mac Pro will be updated (and when it won’t be).

There’s not much about the Mac Pro for Apple to update between Xeon launches. The chipsets (and the ports they support) are also dependent on Intel’s server-class roadmap, so it wouldn’t have been easy, for instance, to have released a Thunderbolt Mac Pro update (with the same CPUs) while waiting for the next Xeon.

Apple can’t switch away from Xeons for the Mac Pro, and Intel hasn’t yet released the dual-socket successor to the current lineup’s CPUs. It was scheduled for release a couple of months ago, but Intel delayed it, and estimates put its release at early March. So — ready for this crazy rumor? — I bet we’ll see new Mac Pros in March, at which point pros can go back to complaining only (and legitimately) about Final Cut Pro X and Apple’s attitude toward the pro software market.