The Apple Mac Pro 2019 needs to be mighty. It needs to be awesome. It needs to be the king of the heap: with a sensible price tag.
The 2013 Mac Pro was.... not
The 2013 Mac Pro cylinder looked awesome, it performed amazingly, and it appeared to be the breakthrough innovation that Apple needed to keep its tech-loving Pro community happy.
It was neat. It was small. It was tough. It was mighty (in 2013), and it had a mighty big price tag.
Since then, it's seen absolutely zero updates, no hardware refreshes, no changes, no price drops, and no further signs of development, from 2013 to 2017. Four years of nothing is forever in Apple land.
In 2013, Apple's Phil Schiller, VP of Marketing, announced the new Mac Pro was groundbreaking and rebutted claims that Apple can't innovate anymore.
However in 2017, Apple admitted the 2013 Mac Pro was a failure, it was impossible to upgrade, and that it had designed itself into a thermal corner. The trashcan Mac Pro was trash, full stop.
The 2019 Mac Pro better be... mighty
While almost nothing is known about the 2019 Mac Pro, we're likely to get a glimpse of the new machine at an Apple iMac event in October 2018.
The new Mac Pro is said to be user-upgradeable, modular, and have a range of high-specification parts aimed at power users and professional customers. That usually translates into "expensive, super expensive".
The tech press is of course anticipating Apple unveiling a stunning new Mac Pro.
Apple have already said that the new Mac Pro will be "modular". The question is, whether it will be a return to the old IBM PC-like form factor of the 2000s or whether it will be a lego-brick-style modular system.
The Minimum
The bare minimum we can be sure of, is that the base model could be exactly the same as the iMac Pro, in a screen-less form factor with iMac Pro style specifications.
The Best
The best we can hope for is a top-of the line Intel Xeon and AMD GPU-based system.
The Other Option
Of course, Apple could pull a mega bait-and-switch, and deliver its own in-house completely-self-designed system, with its own Apple-designed processor, Apple-designed GPU, and Apple-designed motherboard.
Until next time,
Xavier Zymantas
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