The 'Trashcan' Mac Pro: Remembering One of Apple's Most Controversial Designs Nine Years Later

Had mine for 7 years before upgrading to the "cheese grater". I still remember the time I went to lift the shell up after unlocking it, I sliced my finger because the inner edge was like a razor blade. Didn't make that mistake again.
 
vladi said:
There were actual people who bought that. Oh well.
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Yes. I still use mine daily, quad core 3.7 Ghz, that I upgraded to 64 Gb of RAM and doubled the SSD, 3 4K monitors.

Love it, especially since I keep it on my desk, the small footprint is awesome.

I always hoped they'd reuse the design for the Mac Mini/Studio.
 
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djcerla said:
I looked for a used one some years ago and prices were still sky-high. I guess for some it’s been a perfect machine.
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Pretty cheap now at least for a base model. Got the quad core model with 32gb ram for like $300 on eBay. Fully functional one year warranty but more a collectors item as I just thought it looked it cool.
 
opeter said:
This was as much of a dead end as the PowerMac G4 Cube and the iMac with the nodding head.
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The iMac G4? I loved mine! The design had way better thermals than the subsequent slapped-on-the-back-of-the-display designs and the ergonomics of the display were great.
 
I owned one. Used a 43” 4k TV as a monitor. Loved it.

I traveled with it, too, using the Go Case by Waterfield Designs. It got a LOT of extra attention from airport security.

It’s the reason I haven’t bought a Mac Studio. Can’t stand the boring design.
 
Tummy said:
I ordered the 8 core with dual D700 as soon as it was released and got it in mid-2014. I thought it was beautiful and reminded me of the G4 Cube. Now it sits on my shelf next to my 20th Anniversary Mac.
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Three of the coolest looking Macs. Maybe not the most powerful, but pretty darn cool! Really wish they'd re-release all of them with updated specs, and a bit better expandability/upgradability.
 
The trashcan with all its limitations still lives on with the squared off Studio. The trashcan didn’t go anywhere, it was just updated & jammed into a tall mac mini shell
 
Gudi said:
Why isn't the Mac Studio more controversial though? It's quite ugly, not very upgradable and even loud for a Mac.
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Probably because a) the Thunderbolt peripheral market has matured in the 10 years since the Trashcan (there was nothing much to plug into all those TB2 ports in 2013), b) the Studio is aimed at a different market segment (prosumers and creatives who consider a computer to be an appliance rather than a servicable piece of equipment as demanded by the Mac Pro's market space), and c) it offers a compelling amount of power for a relatively good value, especially compared to the rest of Apple's desktop range.

The trashcan Mac Pro was released in an era where all serious peripherals were on PCI cards, it was aimed at people who expected their workstations to be far more user-servicable than it was, and it was not so far above its predecessor in terms of performance or value for money as to be an obvious must-buy

A Trashcan-like machine might have even succeeded in the prosumer market. But it was neve what pros wanted.
 
The trashPro could have been pretty decent... but wasn't.

There's only the TB2 ports where I had issues with the two TB2 Elgato and Belkin docks tested, the dock ports would randomly give out, especially the RJ45 would be dead and require a reboot. The ports couldn't even do 4k at 60Hz - some people say it can, with an active HDMI adapter or something. Plugging in a modern 4k monitor with a displayport cable didn't work.

Then they tried to prevent third party storage upgrades by making their M.2 port proprietary - you can add your own SSD with an adapter easily enough, but it's yet another completely unacceptable restriction in the best and most expensive Pro machine in Apple's lineup at the time.

Finally, they offered no upgrade modules and killed MacOS support early. With their clarification that only the latest MacOS is guaranteed to get all the security patches, the trashPro is essentially out of software support now. Yes sure you can probably make it work just fine with the OpenCore legacy patcher. But you'll never go beyond Ivy Bridge EP 12-core from 2013 that a cheap M1 Mini can beat.

So if I need OpenCore to install the latest MacOS and workarounds for plugging in my display, NVMe M.2 drive, and I'm limited to performance of 2013 - I might as well just stick with my hackintosh. It's based on coffee lake (it's quite old now too) but it does 4k@60Hz no problem, either via iGPU or Ventura also fully supports the 5700 (XT), I can install any and all storage however I like, and I have a full selection of ports, a dozen USB-A, two USB-C, and I even have an Asus Thunderbolt 3 expansion card with a displayport input that I can route from the graphics card so it supports portable monitors that only have USB-C input.

And don't tell me it's more work, if you can upgrade CPU, RAM and storage on a trashPro and install Ventura via OpenCore, you can put together a hackintosh.

cmichaelb said:
3 4K monitors.
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How do you get them to 60Hz? I found 30Hz unusable, never got 60Hz to work and since the monitor doesn't have a free HDMI port I couldn't go the active HDMI adapter route.

PassiveSmoking said:
there was nothing much to plug into all those TB2 ports in 2013
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Exactly. And Apple didn't provide their own TB2 dock. The third party docks I tested were unreliable. I ordered my first 4k screen in 2015 and the trashPro couldn't even do the full 60Hz. I/O was a joke. Apple had every chance to improve at least the display situation with new graphics card modules, but simply never offered upgrade modules despite heavily suggesting that this modular design will be so very upgradeable in the future.
 
MacRumors said:


Apple launched the controversial "trashcan" Mac Pro nine years ago today, introducing one of its most criticized designs that persisted through a period of widespread discontentment with the Mac lineup.

mac_pro_creativity.jpg


The redesign took the Mac Pro in an entirely new direction, spearheaded by a polished aluminum cylinder that became unofficially dubbed the "trashcan." All of the Mac Pro's components were mounted around a central thermal dissipation core, cooled by a single fan that pulled air from under the case, through the core, and out the top. The fan could spin more slowly than smaller fans and keep the Mac extremely quiet, even during intense operations.

Apple announced the radically redesigned Mac Pro at WWDC in 2013. During the announcement, Apple's Phil Schiller infamously remarked "Can't innovate anymore, my ass." The comment was directed at armchair critics who pointed at the previous Mac Pro's lack of updates and claimed Apple had largely abandoned its pro user base and was out of ideas.


schiller_mac_pro.jpg


Phil Schiller unveiling the redesigned Mac Pro in 2013​


Apple said that the new Mac Pro offered twice the overall performance of the previous generation while taking up less than one-eighth of the volume, thanks to its unified thermal core. The Mac Pro twinned Intel Xeon processors with dual AMD FirePro workstation GPUs, enabling it to deliver seven teraflops of computing power.

While the striking design was undoubtedly ambitious, users were unhappy with the way that almost all expansion had to be served externally by Thunderbolt 2 ports. Professional users who were reliant on powerful hardware could not get past the Mac Pro's lack of internal slots to add graphics cards and memory.

The result was a device that was unable to adapt to changing hardware trends. Even Apple seemed unsure how to offer a meaningful hardware update for the Mac Pro – as recently as 2019, it was possible to buy a trashcan Mac Pro from Apple, with no upgrades coming to the device during the six years since its release.



This led Apple to make a rare admission of the product's failure during a meeting with reporters in April 2017, explaining in detail why the device didn't succeed in the way it had hoped. In 2019, Apple's full mea culpa came in the form of yet another Mac Pro redesign, which took the machine back to a highly modular tower form factor with eight PCIe slots and three impeller fans.

Yet in many respects, what the 2013 Mac Pro set out to achieve – a small, powerful computer for professionals, with external expansion only – lives on and has been executed more effectively by 2022's Mac Studio.

Article Link: The 'Trashcan' Mac Pro: Remembering One of Apple's Most Controversial Designs Nine Years Later
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I love mine. Still plugging away after nine years. Has never even once had a hiccup. I think it is brilliant, for what it is. Yes, it was also overpriced, but this is Apple. I currently have 21 peripherals connected to it, and everything works flawlessly (I use it as my main controller for a music studio and photography editing studio). I plan to keep it for as long as I can justify using Monterey.
 
okkibs said:
And don't tell me it's more work, if you can upgrade CPU, RAM and storage on a trashPro and install Ventura via OpenCore, you can put together a hackintosh.
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Building a Hackintosh with any of the new Alder Lake or Raptor Lake processors will run circles around anything Apple has to offer. Yes, the new Intel processors do work in Mac OS. No, the OS can't distinguish between the performance vs. efficiency cores, they're all treated the same. However, when they're all firing off... the those new intel processors are REALLY fast.

For comparison, some Cinebench scores:

12700k - 23,000 pts
12900k - 26,000 pts
13700k - 31,000 pts
13900k - 37,000 pts

Fastest Apple products:
Mac Pro (2019) - 28,000 pts
Mac Studio - 23,000 pts

Too bad it costs a minimum of $5,000 USD to get that kind of performance out of an Apple comp. You could build a significantly faster Hackintosh for less half the price of the fastest one Apple has to offer.

I thought Hackintoshing was going to be a pointless venture once M1 processors were released, but Apple's disgusting pricing still makes it really stupid to spend that kind of money on their top end machines.

Still, not only do you get a way faster and way cheaper machine, you also get the ability to run Windows on it to play some video games, you get way better GPUs and the flexibility to upgrade or swap components.
 
At least it had user-upgradeable RAM and a replaceable SSD, along with a whopping SIX Thunderbolt 2 ports, but that was pretty much it. I suspect that was what also led to more professionals and prosumers opting for the 27" Retina iMac, as while the only easily-replaceable part was the RAM and had only two Thunderbolt ports instead of six, it still had a familiar design and a beautiful built-in 27" screen. Then Apple caught on and came out with the iMac Pro in 2017.
 
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