Apple Mulling Preview of New Modular Mac Pro at WWDC in June

[aarond12]

I just purchased a non-Apple computer for the first time since 1995. It made me sad but still hopeful for the future.

I got a Dell Precision laptop with a beautiful 15" screen, full keyboard with numeric keypad, USB-C and plenty of USB-3 ports, a 500GB m.2 SSD, 16GB RAM (amazingly, a single 16GB DIMM with an open slot for another, which I added), a bland yet attractive design, two GPUs (on-CPU GPU and a Quatro GPU) perfect for offloading video encoding tasks, etc. I paid less than $900 for it shipped.

Do something like this for us, Apple. Even your refurbs are crazy expensive and seemingly last-year's tech. I hate using Windows, but it has come to this. You are losing your customers. I'm using a 10-year-old Mac Pro as my video editing machine. It's getting long in the tooth but still does better than Windows. How long can I keep this poor computer running?

 

[forbegos34]

This is the most intrigued I have ever been by an Apple product. This is the dealbreaker. I'll keep my 2012 Mac Pro til 2020, so I'll know if they keep it updated yearly.

The deal breaker will be its price.

 

[PickUrPoison]

I just purchased a non-Apple computer for the first time since 1995. It made me sad but still hopeful for the future.

I got a Dell Precision laptop with a beautiful 15" screen, full keyboard with numeric keypad, USB-C and plenty of USB-3 ports, a 500GB m.2 SSD, 16GB RAM (amazingly, a single 16GB DIMM with an open slot for another, which I added), a bland yet attractive design, two GPUs (on-CPU GPU and a Quatro GPU) perfect for offloading video encoding tasks, etc. I paid less than $900 for it shipped.

Do something like this for us, Apple. Even your refurbs are crazy expensive and seemingly last-year's tech. I hate using Windows, but it has come to this. You are losing your customers. I'm using a 10-year-old Mac Pro as my video editing machine. It's getting long in the tooth but still does better than Windows. How long can I keep this poor computer running?

45W 8th generation i7/i9 hexacore CPU (or older, low-end quad core)? 4 x Thunderbolt 3 (or zero Thunderbolt ports)? Bright, hi-res screen with accurate, wide color space (or dim, low-res, restricted gamut)? Ultra fast PCIe SSD (or SATA)? 4 lbs (or 5 lbs.)?

Sure, you can get a low-end 15” Windows laptop in the $400-900 range, and it’s true that Apple doesn’t sell a budget 15” laptop. (Does Apple sell a budget anything? Well, not a cell phone, laptop, desktop, tablet, wireless headphone, smart speaker, watch or video-streaming box anyway.) If you don’t need/want MacOS or a relatively high spec Mac/Windows machine, a sub-$1,000 laptop could be perfect for your purposes.

 

[ophello]

Apple are just 'mulling' this over?? Their lack of commitment to the Pro market is astounding (but sadly not surprising)!!

They're mulling over whether to preview their design. They're already working on it. Your lack of reading comprehension is astounding.
[doublepost=1558379797][/doublepost]

Not promised in 2019. The exact qoute from the Mac Roundtable talk from Phil Schiller was;

«Now you won’t see any of those products this year; we’re in the process of that. We think it’s really important to create something great for our pro customers who want a Mac Pro modular system, and that’ll take longer than this year to do.»

That was from 2017. The new Mac Pro will likely be released this year.

Me too. Apples idea of “modular” will be a lot different then our idea of “modular”.

For example, you want to upgrade RAM? Buy this custom Apple hardware “module” that has additional RAM soldered to the module. With no way to just swap in normal memory sticks.

It doesn’t take this long to make a easy to upgrade Mac (ie swap in new memory or change graphics card). Hackintosh people have been doing it for years. It takes this long to make a expensive to upgrade module Mac.

I hope I’m wrong.

When has Apple ever done that? That's absurd.

 

[-hh]

{context: regarding just how 'modular' is to be interpreted}

When has Apple ever done that? That's absurd.

This whole 'modular' topic has been nothing but a hot mess, largely of speculation, because Apple has avoided making any statements which could reduce customer discomfort, such as by stating that they're going to be using existing industry standards and interfaces for XYX.

And even then, there's ample Apple history for where they've not made things easy for the customer to perform 'modular' changes.

For example, adding RAM to an iMac Pro. There's no memory door such as what's been used on prior iMacs to make it easily accessible. Plus Apple's official position is that the memory in iMac Pro (2017) is not only not user-accessible, but that if it needs to be replaced to contact Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider.

Gosh, it couldn't be because Apple wants to charge more than twice that of OWC's $2300 price for 256GB...?

In the meantime, there's no Apple provisions for post-initial-purchase upgrades to video or SSDs.