So, many months ago, I speculated that "rethinking the Mac Pro" would be really rethinking, & the mMP would be an all-in on PCI, including putting the standard IO on a PCI card (apart from ethernet in the actual machine?), to which the "Apple is all about minimalism and simplicity and would never do that" folks reacted as expected, and lo and behold, Apple gave us the slottiest slotbox they've ever made - hell, it's more slot-centric than your average slotbox PC as far as I can see.
Something I also speculated (IIRC as a part of "choose how many slots you want" modular ideas) they'd do is provide software to allow people to manually manage the hardware configuration, in terms of assigning bandwidth / lanes and priorities etc - again, "Apple is all about simplicity, they'd never let or make people do manual things like that".
Well, courtesy of Guilherme Rambo:
https://twitter.com/_inside/status/1145761278251741185
(attached image)
With that in mind, I think we can become more confident that the "Apple is all about simplicity and minimalism" era is pretty much over, and we might be transitioning into an "Apple is about Utility" era, a return to "Design is about enabling function".
Ive has been sh*tcanned the way Forstall was, probably something along the lines of:
Tim: You screwed up our most important Mac products by having your eye off the ball.
Ive: You never come down to look at and approve what we're working on.
Tim: Steve did that, I'm not Steve. It was your job to care for the products. You're either here to do that, or you're not.
Now we have the feeding frenzy as the Cook and Ive camps are media-leaking their own sides, Ive's people are letting slip that Ive didn't like how numbers-focussed Cook was, Cook's people are leaking that Ive was disinterested and never there.
Either way, the old orthodoxy about what Apple would do may not be a predictor for the future. If this next Macbook Pro comes out, and gets a similar Pro treatment, focussed on utility, and giving control back to the user (fixing the keyboard, for example, or having a PCMCIA-like cardslot module that accepts adapters so it can be a CF, SD, or XQD slot), personally, I think it may be a good sign that our much wanted xMac has a future.
Clearly, Apple recognises that external expansion isn't good enough - and they'll also hear that this new Mac Pro is too expensive and too high-end for a significant segment of users - the folks who want the pickup truck with the full-sized bed & load capacity, but don't care about having carpets, or leather seats in the cabin. And sure, call it a gaming-machine all you like, but Apple launched a game service, and people who develop games (a lot of whom are indy), need a machine as good as any customer's gaming machine to test them on. The old orthodoxy of "Apple doesn't care about gamers" may be just as fragile as "Apple is about minimalism".
So, personally I'm growing in confidence that after the next Macbook Pro, we're going to see the return of a displayless machine between the Mac Mini and Mac Pro - they'll give the Mac Pro some time alone to soak up all the orders they can, then they'll release this new machine, which will be iMac-class processors & ram, and have a single MPX bay for one MPX module, or two standard cards, including the power headers, to broaden the MPX volumes, while still reserving the dual MPX (Quad GPU) option for the Mac Pro. Wouldn't surprise me to see the Mac Plus name resurrected, either.
Something I also speculated (IIRC as a part of "choose how many slots you want" modular ideas) they'd do is provide software to allow people to manually manage the hardware configuration, in terms of assigning bandwidth / lanes and priorities etc - again, "Apple is all about simplicity, they'd never let or make people do manual things like that".
Well, courtesy of Guilherme Rambo:
https://twitter.com/_inside/status/1145761278251741185
(attached image)
With that in mind, I think we can become more confident that the "Apple is all about simplicity and minimalism" era is pretty much over, and we might be transitioning into an "Apple is about Utility" era, a return to "Design is about enabling function".
Ive has been sh*tcanned the way Forstall was, probably something along the lines of:
Tim: You screwed up our most important Mac products by having your eye off the ball.
Ive: You never come down to look at and approve what we're working on.
Tim: Steve did that, I'm not Steve. It was your job to care for the products. You're either here to do that, or you're not.
Now we have the feeding frenzy as the Cook and Ive camps are media-leaking their own sides, Ive's people are letting slip that Ive didn't like how numbers-focussed Cook was, Cook's people are leaking that Ive was disinterested and never there.
Either way, the old orthodoxy about what Apple would do may not be a predictor for the future. If this next Macbook Pro comes out, and gets a similar Pro treatment, focussed on utility, and giving control back to the user (fixing the keyboard, for example, or having a PCMCIA-like cardslot module that accepts adapters so it can be a CF, SD, or XQD slot), personally, I think it may be a good sign that our much wanted xMac has a future.
Clearly, Apple recognises that external expansion isn't good enough - and they'll also hear that this new Mac Pro is too expensive and too high-end for a significant segment of users - the folks who want the pickup truck with the full-sized bed & load capacity, but don't care about having carpets, or leather seats in the cabin. And sure, call it a gaming-machine all you like, but Apple launched a game service, and people who develop games (a lot of whom are indy), need a machine as good as any customer's gaming machine to test them on. The old orthodoxy of "Apple doesn't care about gamers" may be just as fragile as "Apple is about minimalism".
So, personally I'm growing in confidence that after the next Macbook Pro, we're going to see the return of a displayless machine between the Mac Mini and Mac Pro - they'll give the Mac Pro some time alone to soak up all the orders they can, then they'll release this new machine, which will be iMac-class processors & ram, and have a single MPX bay for one MPX module, or two standard cards, including the power headers, to broaden the MPX volumes, while still reserving the dual MPX (Quad GPU) option for the Mac Pro. Wouldn't surprise me to see the Mac Plus name resurrected, either.
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