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There's been no reference even to a time frame within 2019. Not an early 2019, Summer 2019, Autumn 2019 etc which at this stage of 2018 you might expect there to be - especially if it was to be in the first quarter of 2019.
Remember the home pod that Apple said would ship by holiday seasons and didn't?
Most likely they aren't going to peg a line on this until they are pretty well settled on what the timeline is going to be.Especially if there have been some slips due to hiccups along the way.
Should not peg this against the steady drip of iPhone leaks because there is at least one (if not two after loop in the subcontractors ) orders of magnitude more people involved in the getting the product to market. The Mac Pro could be less than 50. Leaking about the Mac pro isn't going to be worth getting fired over. The supply chain of exterior vendors is much smaller, the don't want to loose the business either.
The Mac Pro makes absolutely zero difference to Apple's financials so they don't particularly care. ( a huge fraction of this rumors stuff is folks gaming the stock price of Apple and suppliers. The Mac Pro isn't significant. )
If the new Mac Pro was to be released in October 2019 for example, it would mean a whopping two and a half years had passed from announcement to delivery - slow even by Apple standards and you'd have thought if it was coming before then there would have been...well...something... a slither of news, a rumour...anything by now just to perk people's interest.
If it was October 2019, it is reasonably likely they would do a "sneak peak" at the WWDC. That would give them an excuse to kill off the older Mac Pros then.
Apple doesn't have to actively generate buzz as long as folks spontaneously keep generating threads.
Apple's longest drought without any activity is the Mac Mini. If they were going to back channel leak something, it would probably be around it over next couple of months.
So is anyone starting to worry about the silence? Is 2019 going to become 2020?
IMHO, no. In part because Apple is going to be highly motivated to put the MP 2013 in the Vintage/Obsolete countdown clock sometime in 2019. They are also highly likely want to end the older MacPro 2010-2012 line up into Obsolete status. ( the workaround Mojave with another card is band-aid, stop gap for being late. )
From the lack of updates you'd have to assume it's unlikely (though not impossible) that a new Mac Pro will be arriving in the first half of 2019, so the second half of 2019 is looking more likely which means we could still be a year or more away from seeing it which is kind of depressing.
Apple's official policy is that they do not talk about future products. So Apple saying nothing isn't indicative of "sooner" or "later". It just means they are doing what they normally do. They may vary in special corner cases by a quarter or two but 3+ quarters is widely divergent from their standard practice. "The not this year" stuff is more expectation management ( more so popping balloons of talk that is widely decoupled from reality. )
It is not unlikely that it could come first half of 2019. Leaks are a matter of the number of people with loose lips. Not whether the work is being done or not. There is a Intel Xeon W refresh queued up for early 2019 ( for volume to customers. ). [ At one point on Intel roadmaps that was Q4 18 so sliding components are all the more reason to talk early. ] 1H19 gets out of the window of an initial macOS release. ( matching up the Mac Pro release to the macOS new release isn't really a good thing. )
All I'd say is Apple had better get this product right.
If they make us wait this long and give us another lemon then I think it'd be the final straw for a lot of Mac users.
Perhaps the fridge of what is left of the older Mac Pro users. But Mac users? no; not even close. The overwhelmingly majority of Mac users aren't going to buy a Mac Pro.
If Apple does a MacBook Air , Macbook , iMac , and Mac Mini bump over the rest of 2018 and 1H 2019, most Mac buyers will be quite happy.
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Apple still wants to sell nMPs, if they announce the mMP availability date, people will wait it out, and not buy new machines.
That is doubtful. In Apple's first meeting in April 2017 the mentioned a significant trend in folks moving from Mac Pros to iMacs. ( I know that is not the rabid fans who are left, but significant folks have. ). The iMac Pro provides a pathway for those folks. It is also a pathway for a significant fraction of the early buyers of the MP 2013.
Apple isn't trying to sell large volumes of the MP 2013 (nMP). It is largely there as a placeholder. Quite similar to how the 2012 model was a placeholder until they get the MP 2013 out the door.
For the folks held their breath for the 2012-2016 window of the Mac Pro 2013 transition, then they probably are still holding their breath (or circling the airport) now. They aren't going to buy the nMP. Apple doesn't have any expectation that they will. Folks can hold out, but the catch-22 is that doesn't get you expediency the way Apple sets priorities ( more buyers , more resources. significantly shrinking buyers , less resources ).
How long does it take other PC manufacturers to go from concept of a workstation to production, I mean what, 6 months?
At Mac Pro levels? No. Apple gets out iPhones out on a yearly basis but they have 14-18 month cycles. The issue is whether the development is concurrent and pipelined or not. The ramp up on the Mac Pro is long most likely because they completely stopped working on it. Until the iMac Pro finished it probably got no resources assigned. Even after reboot it is probably sharing some resources.
I think what's holding them back it the number of PCI-E lanes and Thunderbolt 4, leading me to believe the modular Mac Pro will be nothing more than the Cube 3.0, with all it's external cabling hell and desktop bloat. I mean, what is the point of a wonderful design if I have to connect an external box with power and IO cables every time I turn around.
There is little to back that up. Intel Xeon W went to 48 from the 40 of the last generation E5. The corresponding PCH controller also so a significant bump in PCI-e lanes. There is enough.
Thunderbolt 4 ? TB doesn't need any more churn over the next year or so. The switch to Type C connector and the rollout of the 3rd party controllers is enough of a "change" for the market to adapt to.
Apple could have just used the cMP form factor and rushed a product out the door years ago, that number one would have sold, and filled the need of millions, tens of millions?, that have already jumped ship to the PC workstation world.
Millions? The Mac Pro is probably way closer to 100K than it is 1M. You are probably off by at least an order of magnitude. With the iMacs going to 6+ core and entry-mid desktop like GPU and the iMac Pro, the revised Mac Pro would probably be doing good if it got to 60-80K per year. The old Mac Pros weren't selling millions.
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There's a lot of wrong things going at Intel, but this week they leaked that
Ice Lake-SP Xeons on 10nm are for 2020. So, maybe 2019 is lost for the new new Mac Pro.
Not particularly likely that Apple would use SP processors. More likley they'd use Xeon W. ( there will be a corresponding W iteration around the same time. ). There is about zero rational reason to wait for Ice Lake.
Cooper Lake is probably going to be socket compatible with Cascade Lake. If Apple went with Cacade Lake they could
a. also update the iMac Pro.
b. get two cycles out of this basic board design. ( just like they used to. )
c. retire off the ancient raft the Mac Pros that will be a support boat anchor going forward.
Apple has already wasted tons of time. Ice Lake isn't some magic bullet. If AMD doesn't screw things up, Ice Lake may not even be the better option.
Perhaps Apple is waiting them to unlock the thermal corner, trying to not repeat MP6,1. If Apple really wants to go with Ice Lake-SP, better they show us something and fast…
The major thermal issues of the MP 2013 ( 6,1) was the GPUs not the CPUs. Punting to some future Intel CPU isn't going to address that primary root cause problem.
Apple already has a thermal corner. The iMac Pro is llargely in pretty similar thermal corner. Just take same baseline and remove that is all that is sufficient. (and add another internal GPU or "big slot" card option. ).
At least, all this problems at Intel kept the classic Mac Pro support for one more year, maybe two, since Apple usually drops Mac support on one year and keep the same supported list on the next.
Errr, not really. Really bad product lineup management at Apple is why Apple is goosing the old Mac Pro's forward.
Intel isn't the problem. AMD really isn't either.
if Apple had spun up resources in 2014-15 to run the iMac Pro and current mindset on the Mac Pro in parallel Apple would have had two products at about the same time. They didn't. So they only ended up with the iMac Pro and the same "rob Peter to pay Paul" development queues across the whole Mac product line up.
