Apple Launched the Controversial 'Trashcan' Mac Pro 11 Years Ago Today

[rikki_t]

The dual GPU set-up required software venders to make there programs dual card aware with specific drivers, the only problem with that was that next to none did, so the second GPU remained idol most of the time, this and the fact that TB2 was rubbish as a standard and the ungainly connectors fitted badly, apart from this it was great machine

 

[vegetassj4]

They are still selling it, but it looks like they have finally upgraded the case (texture)…..oh wait a minute

 

[MacFarmer]

This did not go well as planned But still looks nice. Even better then mac studio. I might buy one when the price drops to 100 bucks, just to have for fun. Maybe for Mojave.

 

[Ctrlos]

Ironic that even a $599 Mac Mini is good enough for 90% of tasks a Professional in any industry might throw at it.

 

[Mac Fly (film)]

Arrived Intel-years too soon.

 

[Naraxus]

Guys, take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask yourself: Do we really need to be celebrating the 11th birthday of the trash can mac?

Why does this bother you that people are?

 

[brofkand]

Props to Apple for trying something new, but it was a complete failure and never should have replaced the tower Mac Pro. The announcement that day proved Apple had no idea what their pro users wanted.

 

[jamface]

During the announcement, Apple's Phil Schiller infamously remarked "Can't innovate anymore, my ass." The comment was directed at critics who pointed at the previous Mac Pro's lack of updates and claimed Apple had largely abandoned its pro user base and was out of ideas.

He didn’t say that. He said “Can’t innovate any more my ass!”

Attributing the comma implies that his meaning was actually “My ass can’t innovate any more”. Which, whilst probably accurate (and thanks for your candour, Mr Schiller), is likely not what he was trying to put across.

 

[throAU]

We still use ours… it is the most gorgeous Mac design ever!

I'd wanted one since launch but as someone without a workload to justify it at the time, couldn't buy one.

But I love the design and own one now mostly because of that (I consider it an art piece / collectable piece of computing history), but it's also a neat desktop that is still a decent performer today. It opened my eyes to how much nicer macOS is with plenty of RAM, you are just freed from having to care about resource usage at all, it just grinds through whatever and remains responsive.

 

[joecomo]

at least it looked nice on the desk

 

[joecomo]

It's beautiful. The Darth Vader R2-D2 of computers.

yes indeed - in this area the Mac Studio doesn't surpass it

 

[throAU]

I also liked the design of the "trashcan." It's too bad the thermal performance wasn't where it needed to be, dooming it to a one and done iteration.

As others have mentioned, I suspect it was built based on what intel promised vs. what they delivered. If you were to put Apple silicon in that form factor it would be awesome.

One m4 ultra in each of the GPU sides and an IO board where the CPU board is.

It could totally work today, and would probably even make more sense than the stupid oversized tower that we have with slots that serve basically no purpose today.

I suspect a lot of the people crapping on the trashcan never actually used one.

 

[joecomo]

The "trashcan" Mac Pro was an awful design, but at least it had upgradable memory and upgradable storage. Tim Cook, being the greedy MBA degree holding corporate suit that he is, has since removed upgradable memory and upgradable storage from all Macs, both desktop and laptop, to pressure customers to buy new Macs when they need more memory or more storage. That way, Cook can continue to increase profits for shareholders by giving less and less to customers.

I always wonder how they can do this and claim to be ecologically conscious simultaneously

 

[throAU]

I always wonder how they can do this and claim to be ecologically conscious simultaneously

They have a recycling program and make their machines out of recyclable and recycled materials.

As I mentioned above, the percentage of people who ACTUALLY upgrade machines is small enough to be a rounding error.

Most don't. They run whatever they buy until it gets too slow or breaks and then upgrade to a new device. And if you spec properly in the first place, that totally makes sense - after a few years GPUs, CPUs and IO standards move on. Lets say my old M1 Pro MacBook was upgradable - I'd still be missing out on roughly 2x CPU and GPU performance, the battery is degraded, thunderbolt 5 now exists, new wifi and bluetooth standards exist, etc.

Upgradability, whilst nice just doesn't make sense for 99% of the market who will never upgrade it, whilst incurring additional cost and reliability (you don't need to ever re-seat things to diagnose problems if they are soldered).


Note:
I'm not saying I personally don't appreciate upgrade-ability. It's why I have built my own desktop PCs for the past 30 years. But I am not the majority of the customer base.

 

[zoozx]

Awful Design and price point, Just Awful.
You wonder how, this got off the drawing board.

 

[yellowbunny]

Literally have mine open now doing some 4k editing in resolve. Still working super (thank you oclp).

 

[joecomo]

They have a recycling program and make their machines out of recyclable and recycled materials.

As I mentioned above, the percentage of people who ACTUALLY upgrade machines is small enough to be a rounding error.

Most don't. They run whatever they buy until it gets too slow or breaks and then upgrade.

Upgradability, whilst nice just doesn't make sense for 99% of the market who will never upgrade it, whilst incurring additional cost and reliability (you don't need to ever re-seat things to diagnose problems if they are soldered).

I fear these are reasonable arguments - however, I am still angry about my late2014 Retina iMac27 being unusable as it is. Although it is economically ludicrous (if I figure in the time spent), some day I will convert it into a Monitor.

 

[throAU]

Literally have mine open now doing some 4k editing in resolve. Still working super (thank you oclp).

I'm upgrading mine to Sequoia with OCLP this weekend

 

[AndyUnderscoreR]

The worst Mac I ever bought. Crashed several times a day. Apple admitted their graphics cards had thermal management problem but pretended it only affected the D500 and D700, so refused to do anything about my D300 machine, even down to taking it away and pretending to soak test it for a week then saying it didn't crash.

 

[joecomo]

I'm upgrading mine to Sequoia with OCLP this weekend

nice if that still works - for our iMac27 it worked well a couple of times - but then it slowed down and the fan was running 24x7

 

[canonical]

Everyone who has owned one loves it. Ignore the grumbles over semantics over the name Pro (which to some means expandable). Apple tries keeping to placate that market with a large full-size expandable machine that never sells well, and is always running a year behind the rest of the fleet in performance ... so yes, the new Mac Pro might be expandable, but it's hardly the fastest Mac, unless you are into very specialised parallel computing.

 

[Dr32Degrees]

What’s the difference to the Mac Pro today? Nothing. No hardware upgrades possible.
Still a failure and Apples knows it.
(It doesn’t even use it in commercials)

Not sure what you meant by this...I bought one off eBay and upgraded it to the highest Xeon and 64gb of RAM, and it still runs Sequoia through OCLP.

At a nearly $4 trillion market cap this morning, I am fairly certain Apple has moved on from this "failure" that you perceived.

This sounds identical to the comments under the AVP articles.

 

[Dr32Degrees]

Everyone who has owned one loves it. Ignore the grumbles over semantics over the name Pro (which to some means expandable). Apple tries keeping to placate that market with a large full-size expandable machine that never sells well, and is always running a year behind the rest of the fleet in performance ... so yes, the new Mac Pro might be expandable, but it's hardly the fastest Mac, unless you are into very specialised parallel computing.

This. The comments here sound just like the ones under the AVP stories. I bought one off eBay just to play with; it did not deserve the hate that it got 11 years ago.

 

[throAU]

 

[Mike_Trivisonno]

I had one of these. Great little machine. My monitors made more noise than the CPU.