Matthew Panzerino of
TechCrunch was at that meeting too and he goes into some other detail. He quoted Phil Schiller as saying that notebooks were 80% of shipping Macs while desktops were 20%. These are stats that don't usually get released during other events so it's worth bearing in mind.
Of course, the remaining 20% desktop has 3 lines with iMac clearly being top dog followed by the Mini and Mac Pro. Schiller also said the Mini has a place with consumers with some Pro usage. I have also speculated that Apple could be going modular to get top end Mac Mini users buying the entry level Pro and allow them to cost reduce the Mini with (even) slower parts [more energy efficient].
As said elsewhere by many other including myself the Mini could have been speed-bumped at any time using the existing case design by using the non-touchbar Macbook Pro 15w Skylake CPUs to reduce the amount of SKUs they have to cater for.
But we're at the point where Kaby Lake CPUs will be available soon and the Macbook has yet to be updated and I suspect Apple may want to update the Macbook Pro with the
terraced battery they always intended to put in it before they had those problems.
If we're then into 'modular' designs for the Mac Pro - and it's noted that the Apple executives chose their words extremely carefully - then we can expect people to speculate over exactly what modular means for the next 12-18 months.
I'd suspect that repair costs and upgradability are a factor and Apple may still not want people to be able to put a third-party PC PCIe 3.0 16x GPU into a 2018 Mac Pro. eGPU might have been a popular choice back there but a Thunderbolt 3 external GPU solution would mean more noise, huge expense, and ultimately limited bandwidth (using a powerful AMD Vega GPU and then crippling it with a 4x PCIe 3 solution costing 4x the price of putting a PC card into a 16x PCIe 3.0 slot in a workstation is just foolish). Or does modular mean they are looking into Oculink?
Yes, Apple don't want noisy cards ruining a Mac Pro, they don't want people flashing the ROM on an AMD VEGA GPU so you don't have to buy your pricey upgrade from them from day 1. But the alternative is (nervously) buying a proprietary solution.
In terms of modern PC design, they may well go back to a mini tower, but something with sound deadening and air filters to maintain the ultra silence under load rather than the old cheese grater design because they'll be looking at potentially cooling an AMD VEGA FURY with multi-core Xeon CPUs (yes, back to multi CPU offerings?) for top end users.
It's a pity that Apple can't make anything of the existing 2013 Mac Pro design going forward with just one GPU due to the triangular heat sink needing equalised heat on all three sides.
Here's a few things that will make a 2018 Mac Pro worth considering:
Coffee Lake consumer Intel CPUS are out next year - 6 core i7 CPUs with hyper threading, 4 core with hyper threading i5, maybe even 4 core i3. This is Intel's reaction to AMD Ryzen and I think Apple have had to react with the unusual briefing because those extra cores could have caused Pro users to jump ship forever within 12-18 months. I expect iMacs to have these as options too.
PCI Express 4.0 specification could be finalised and ready to roll next year. If Thunderbolt 4 appears and can drive an 8K screen with a single TB4 cable that might be a reason behind the mentioned return of an Apple branded display.
For internal graphics, maybe Apple would use an existing but little known connector standard just to be awkward?
Optane SSD is available with Kaby Lake configurations, potentially an option with high end iMac or Macbook Pros later this year due to price so an obvious option for the 2018 Mac Pro.
AMD VEGA GPUs arrive later this year. They supposedly support PCIe 4.0 as well.
