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The 'Trashcan' Mac Pro: Remembering One of Apple's Most Controversial Designs Nine Years Later
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It isn't when it is working properly.
Lots of people here have reported an annoying whine (either from the fan or power supply) - which seems to be a QA issue, not going to defend Apple against that - but it is a fault and doesn't affect all units. Like all such things, while I don't doubt the people reporting it, it is impossible to tell from a forum like this how common it really is.
Other than that, some people have been put off by the fact that it isn't silent and the fan runs continually (at low speed, very quietly) - but it is very rare to hear them speed up under the sort of load that would have the fans roaring on an Intel iMac or MBP.
It's boring-but-innofensive looking - OTOH, unlike the trashcan, it sits neatly under a screen (as in the pictures) and gives you a couple of handy front-facing ports & they haven't gone down the silly external power brick route of the 24" iMac. What else are they going to do with what is - when it comes down to it - a box? The trashcan shows what can go wrong when you try to be clever for the sake of it.
The only bad parts are that you have to completely dismantle it to clean the fan & Apple have chosen not to make SSD upgrades available - but at least it does look fairly straightforward to dismantle & the SSDs are, at least, replaceable.
A beautiful, if inflexible (for growth) design. I definitely liked it.
It's design idea lives on in the Xbox Series X (a square sided tall trash can) that you can (mostly) get today. Not nearly as beautiful, but the relatively compact design shows the design's advantages.
It's design idea lives on in the Xbox Series X (a square sided tall trash can) that you can (mostly) get today. Not nearly as beautiful, but the relatively compact design shows the design's advantages.
I still have one. I killed my first one when a glass of water got spilled. The bottom fan sucked up the water and poof, it died. Wasn't even spectacular it just turned off never to turn on again. No sparks, no noise, no steam, nothing. Just dead.
OYYYYY lampshade iMac has more character than any computer ever. Just that stupid DVD drive was hitting the keyboard.
I think the Xbox Series X design would be perfect for the Mac Studio if we had a Blu-ray drive 😛 and some SSD slots.
Yeah. I made a ton of cash using it for, y'know, work.
As crap as 2013 Mac Pro desktop setup is with all the dongles, hanging cables and bunch of IO, HDD, GPU housings and cases next to it that take away more money, more space, collect more dust and require more maintenance than the 2012 Mac Pro. That's of course if you were using your computer for any serious media production back then. If you did than on the Day 0 of the unveling you've realized how much of an unnecessary crap this was. Lack of any updates just showed us this was a design excersise more than anything actually useful.
Most of the people I know who used this piece on day 1 were actually lightweight graphic designers, photographers who wanted their woork desk to look pretty and impress clients. Nothing wrong with novelty factor.
One thing I remember about this release was how amazing the Mac Pro section of the website was. All black, and this was the first time I think where they used animations of the unit coming open to show you what was inside etc.
I saw an Oscar winning movie edited on a room full of trash cans. I even got to watch the final edit before the director 😂 it was so late at night.
People keep saying that it was a “great design”, but clearly that’s not true otherwise Apple would have kept it up to date.
Aesthetically it may have a great design, but the engineering was ill conceived. It didn’t have the thermal capacity for more powerful chips to be used in the future, which is arguably the most important factor of a performance device.
Aesthetically it may have a great design, but the engineering was ill conceived. It didn’t have the thermal capacity for more powerful chips to be used in the future, which is arguably the most important factor of a performance device.
Wasn’t possible to update even if Apple wanted because Intel and AMD chips kept getting hotter and delayed. There was expectation 10 years ago that all those x86 and Radeon would become much more efficient every 2 years and it never happened. Still hasn’t happened. They just gobbled more and more power.
The Mac Studio is the successor of the trash can and that was made possible by Apple Silicon.
I used it in 3D animation for film and Commercials. The D700 was good for 2013, but was outdated very quickly.
Sort of.
It's funny; I get the impression that the Mac Pro in theory had a better heat dissipation approach. I guess they felt customers had too many negative associations with the design, so they'd rather not reuse it.
One thing I found weird from the start was the decision to go with one CPU and two GPUs. Wouldn't a lot of customers have benefitted more from two CPUs and one GPU?
As for the Studio, you can't upgrade its RAM at all, and you can pretty much not upgrade its SSD, just replace it. The Mac Pro, if I'm not mistaken, allowed upgrades of both of those.
Yes. I upgraded my MP to 64 GB and a 2 TB SSD (that just died a few days ago).
Take the specs of the M1 studio and put it in a trashcan, and i'd but it all over again!
No, it's not like that.
The previous Mac Pro that inherited the case from the PowerMac was a hot, bulky, expandible computer, a computer heavily placed in an industry in which Apple in 2010 no longer had representation (perhaps the most forget that Apple disbanded much of the professional sw, the XServe, and soon the routers).
The 2013 Mac Pro is a different Mac Pro, it was born with the stated purpose of bringing a certain industry, the Prosumers more than the Pros, to a different era. Did it work? No, Why? Because Apple engineers are scarce. The Mac Pro had serious cooling issues caused by cpus and gpus. I saw 3 burning in a Sonnet solution for television studios, in 2013, just presented, when we tested them to change all the Mac Pro (2008-2012) machines in the television network I was working for, more or less a 3/4000 Mac Pro, between working and others used as spare parts.
I was very friendly with the internal technical department that fixed the Mac Pros after the Apple national subsidiary, which had been next to our headquarters for decades because we were the best customer, was closed to focus on the retail department and the 24h/7d professional support contracts were closed to give them to the Apple Geniuses, a mass of incompetents of biblical size; the technical department had the order to replace the machines cancelled because nothing seemed to work, they burned Mac Pro 2013 as if they were firewood.
I'd argue it's impossible to get away with a closed form factor like this when the technology changes so fast. I'd love to have a perfect sphere floating mid-air for a computer but only knowing it won't become obsolete with next year's software update. And I'm not even talking about pro market, which requires connectivity and adaptability i.e. openness.
I referred to mind as the "Cylinder of Destiny". I actually still used it until recently when I sold it, and replaced it with a Mac Studio to support Ventura.
Yeah right?
Imagine if people started using GPUs to make computations faster, or buying into the idea of putting GPUs into PCI cages and hooking them up as external devices and using them that way.
Crazytalk.
I bought a house (among other things obviously) with the money I earned working on a trash can Mac Pro, so it served my needs just fine at the time.
it had massive thermal issues and was shelved for it.
it was a failure engineering wise.
I never understood all the hate. My only complaint was the inability to upgrade the graphics. In the six years I owned mine, it performed great and was the quietest computer I’d ever owned up to that point.