Call me a conspiracy theorist, but after reading the TechCrunch piece, it seems really clear to me that Apple was planning to stop producing the Mac Pro and maybe license Mac OS to a third party for workstation machines. I get the sense that like these network tv deals we always hear rumors about, negotiations fell through and they decided to go back to producing it in house.
Phil said that it won't be available in 2017, because building the kind of machine they're planning on will "take longer than this year to do". Well, what's been going on since 2013? Not a single spec-bump? It was clear in 2015 with the introduction of the MacBook that they were going all-in on USB-C (which the nMP lacks) and the magical ecosystem of thunderbolt 2 devices that were supposed to augment the nMP never materialized. They didn't just come to this realization yesterday.
Just a few months ago Apple got out of the monitor game, and now, all of a sudden, they're back in - but have no info on what exactly they're going to offer. This all strikes me as very suspicious if they were really invested in the Pro all this time.
Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled that they're back on track and letting people know desktop Macs aren't dead, but this seems like the result of an internal war where the side in favor of ditching the line was calling the shots, and all of a sudden, something happened that caused them to reverse course.
