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LETTER OF THE MONTH!

WHAT RUBBISH!

How dare you dismiss the 2013 ’trashcan’ Mac Pro as ‘a rare modern-Apple flop’ (‘40 years of Mac’ in #MF400).

The Mac Pro is the most futuristic, interesting, well designed and well built Mac ever. Designed in California and built in the good ol’ US of A too. No glue, no tape, no fragile connectors and best of all, no ’system on a chip’ nonsense. It has been the most reliable Mac I’ve ever owned (of many). I take it apart every six months to clean and service the heatsink, CPU and video cards. Everything unscrews and goes back together again without breaking. I have upgraded the processor, blade SSD and RAM. It runs faultlessly on Ventura with no problem and I love it. This shiny black lump of gorgeousness attracts more interest than anything else in my office and plays high resolution music all day, every day without fault. It will be with me forever – which is more than can be said for my M1 iMac. That piece of junk has gone to the great scrapyard in the sky.

ROB SAYS…

There’s no doubt that the ‘trashcan’ Mac Pro (2013) is/was an incredible piece of engineering, but it was also one of Apple’s least successful attempts to replace its predecessor – the Mac Pro tower.

With the company struggling to meaningfully upgrade it, in 2017 both Apple’s (at the time) VP for Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller and its software engineering VP, Craig Federighi, remarked on its relative failure (and criticism from customers) at a press event.

At the event, Federighi admitted that Apple had “designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner”, something Schiller then reiterated adding “It restricted our ability to upgrade it. And for that, we’re sorry to disappoint customers who wanted that, and we’ve asked the team to go and re-architect and design something great for… those Mac Pro customers who want more expandability, more upgradability.”

The result was the Apple went back to basics and came up with the reimagined Mac Pro it introduced in 2019 – a design that still exists today with Apple silicon M2 Ultra chips onboard.