They didn’t intend that to be a one off. But this article presumes it was plausible that the Studio was intended to be a one off, which would have been insane
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Gurman: Mac Studio Isn't One-Off Stopgap Product, New Models Planned
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That was down to Apple not specifying sufficient cooling (as one of the major sales points was it would operate silently on your desk). So the existing cooling had enough problems keeping the original CPU and GPU options sufficiently cool, to say nothing of the hotter CPUs and GPUs Intel and AMD released subsequently.
To be fair, it leveraged a fair bit of kit and production capacity from the base iMac 5K. And it did not help that Intel did not release an upgrade Xeon CPU option until Apple was already committed to move the Mac to Apple Silicon so there was only really one cycle available to it.
I don’t know about that - Apple’s history there sends mixed messages. They never had to make an expandable Mac Pro, and for a long time they didn’t. Which kinda suggests they don’t particularly like the idea, but saw some reason to do it anyway. <shrugs>
I suspect you may be right though. I’m no expert, but I’d guess if the M2 had the hardware to connect to external expansion slots we’d have heard about it when people examined it and did xrays etc, so presumably it doesn’t currently, and I very much doubt they’ll do a specific bespoke design for the tiny Mac Pro market.
That reason was given at the 2017 "mea culpa" event - their most-serious professional customers told them the 2013 model did not work for them and if Apple did not offer them something similar to the 2006-2012 model, they would have no choice but to leave macOS for Windows and Linux.
They did already, at least a huge number that need a real Mac Pro is now using either Windows or Linux, as I've been saying, my bet is that apple will phase out Mac Pro, is too expensive to justify, now days you can get an amazing desktop PC with either intel or AMD that smokes current Mac Pro at a fraction of its price.
That doesn't help you if your workflow is based around Final Cut Pro or Logic Pro.
And enough of them stayed with macOS and professional macOS applications for Apple to justify making a new Mac Pro to run them at maximum capability.Let us not forget that the majority of people and companies who bought 2019 Mac Pros have revenue streams that paid for them within months. Yes, some people bought it for bragging rights or were still rocking 2006-2012 Mac Pros and plan to use their 2019 models into the 2030s. But I am confident those folks are in the single-digit percentages of owners.
Apple did spend a lot of R&D to give those people and companies not only a new Mac Pro in 2019, but also a truly pro level iMac in 2017 because they appear to want to continue to support that customer base even though one can run macOS professional applications really well on a Mac Studio or MacBook Pro.
It is true that Apple is not beholden to supporting a product market just because they did - witness wireless routers and for a time, home speakers and external displays - so I do agree with you that Apple will not continue the Mac Pro if the model makes no financial sense to them.
I expect that the rumors that the "2023" Mac Pro will just be the 2019 chassis with an M2 Ultra instead of a Xeon is a repeat of the 2005 Mac Pro Developer Transition Kit (which used the existing PowerPC Mac Pro chassis with an Intel CPU instead of a G5). But it could also be a sign that Apple is not sure if the model will prove worthy of keeping and not wanting to spend a lot of money developing a custom Apple Silicon Mac Pro case just yet.
That's a good theory on where the dumb M2 Ultra rumors may have come from, if they are actually more than just something Gurman pulled out of his ass. Although I'm not sure it makes complete sense that Apple would need release a transitionary developer machine in this case... mainly the reason developers would need this is to get PCIe cards working with ASi, except they can already do that with the Sonnet external PCIe enclosures. But certainly for internal use or select developers that really need it for some reason, I could imagine it existing.
Either way, I expect Apple still has a lot of work left to do to make a new machine worthy of being called the Mac Pro, so I'm really not expecting to see one yet if we get one at all.
That doesn't help you if your workflow is based around Final Cut Pro or Logic Pro.
Let us not forget that the majority of people and companies who bought 2019 Mac Pros have revenue streams that paid for them within months. Yes, some people bought it for bragging rights or were still rocking 2006-2012 Mac Pros and plan to use their 2019 models into the 2030s. But I am confident those folks are in the single-digit percentages of owners.
Apple did spend a lot of R&D to give those people and companies not only a new Mac Pro in 2019, but also a truly pro level iMac in 2017 because they appear to want to continue to support that customer base even though one can run macOS professional applications really well on a Mac Studio or MacBook Pro.
It is true that Apple is not beholden to supporting a product market just because they did - witness wireless routers and for a time, home speakers and external displays - so I do agree with you that Apple will not continue the Mac Pro if the model makes no financial sense to them.
I expect that the rumors that the "2023" Mac Pro will just be the 2019 chassis with an M2 Ultra instead of a Xeon is a repeat of the 2005 Mac Pro Developer Transition Kit (which used the existing PowerPC Mac Pro chassis with an Intel CPU instead of a G5). But it could also be a sign that Apple is not sure if the model will prove worthy of keeping and not wanting to spend a lot of money developing a custom Apple Silicon Mac Pro case just yet.
That transition Mac inside a Power PC case, was later on replaced by an iMac, since then the Mac Pro is synonymous of $4K+ pricing.
The days of "affordable" Mac Pros are long gone.
I disagree with your analogy on a number of counts. With regards all PC sales falling its true, but Apple's fall was more unexpected and greater than any of the others and pointing to its previous sales is going backwards, and we already see substantial discounting of some Apple devices, and indeed with the M3 expected to be even more power efficient, then the massive heat sink in the studio might not be necessary and that is in the main why its so much larger than the Mac mini. If they had just the one range, calling it whatever the want, i.e. Mac mini, Mac Studio, gives them so much cheaper production run, but with the ability to have multiple configurations allowing customers the choice of the base range to the pro range.
Exactly - they didn't want to do it but they did it to please a vocal minority of customers. It'll be interesting to see if they still value pleasing those people so much that they make a modular ARM Mac.
IMO, that is because the rest of the Mac desktop line has become significantly more powerful than back in the early 2000s so you no longer need to buy a Mac Pro if you want to do "serious" work.
Third-party retailers always offer discounts on Macs to generate sales. And Amazon, for example, only applies those discounts to a percentage of their current stock, not the entire stock (as proven by when the sale price ends, you can still buy the model for immediate delivery at the regular price), so they do not seem to be offering discounts because they are sitting on massive stocks of unsold wares, but instead as a way to entice folks to make impulse purchases ( almost worked for me twice
).And the Mac Studio doesn't need the heatsink it has with M1. My guess is Apple wanted to "future proof" the design for future generations of SoCs that will run at higher clock speeds and consequently use more more power and generate more heat.
In the end, I do not believe Mac is in any real trouble and the current product line is wide and deep enough to meet customer demands. As such, I remain unconcerned with current Mac sales trends and believe they are nothing more than the usual cyclical nature of Mac sales.
Not laughing at you, I'm laughing at what Apple says. It is not, in any way, shape, or form, modular. I see where they are trying to come from on it, but no, you have to compare them to other computer manufacturers and the PC part is modular in a lot of PC's, and anything you plug in to it is an accessory (keyboard, mouse, external drive, monitor(s)), not a module.