Given Apple’s current locked-down trajectory with the Mac, the Mac Pro was gonna die eventually, and it’s for the best that it does given it was reduced to little more than a massively overpriced Mac Studio grafted onto a useless PCIe backplane; a $12k grift, basically.
PCs at least are still modular and expandable; for now.
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They’re overpriced crap now. You buy at a 3x premium for the hardware, and you get the OS. That’s it.
But it all lives in a big cheese grater
Some businesses have that genetic ideological backbone that defines what they can and can’t do with good results.
In case of Apple - at some point they were a “cheaper and better for home users, but less serious and more toyish” computer company in their advertising and, well, quality. And in some sense this seems to have carried through from the 90s till now, as their equilibrium.
And honestly when in the 90s they were gradually becoming something more luxury, that was already a mistake. Then Jobs came with the NeXT purchase, and, of course, with Apple’s financial situation then it was probably the only way to survive to further go in that direction.
It actually made me optimistic about that company to read rumors about them preparing to go for lower market with another laptop model in 2026.
Because the world has changed, and I’d say not only Mac Pro is a suitcase without handle, I’d also say the same about iMacs. If they are not making an extensible stationary machine, then having a few laptop lines (cheap light, good light, powerful heavier) and a stationary line (well, Mac Mini and Mac Studio seem that, stationary normal and stationary powerful) is optimal. Since each line means expenses and different components and separate advertising.
It sort of feels as if they were returning to the roots. Perhaps they feel that they are stalled or losing in the mobile market, and same with the luxury market - their cult offensive was impressive, but it’s wearing out. While with desktops they have a chance at rapid expansion.
In no world has Apple ever been the cheaper option
The Mac Classic was the first Mac to sell for under $1k, and the ‘LC’ acronym stood for ‘Low-cost Color,’ that said IIRC even back then there were PC clones that were cheaper than the at-the-time cheapest Macs, and that were actually expandable to boot even if they didn’t ship with better specs out the box. Also, the Mac Classic still shipped with a 68k and 1MB RAM, maxing out at 4MB. In 1990. When the 486 had been out for a year and the 386 had been out for five years, and I’m pretty sure PCs were shipping with more than 1MB RAM by then.
Even within Apple’s own lineup at the time, the original Mac LC shipped with an '020 vs. the Classic’s 68k.
Additionally IIRC the Apple IIc was sold as a cheaper variant of the Apple II line.
Being the “low cost Mac” is very different from being the cheapest option.
Though I’ll say that my one Mac purchase in the early 00’s was a few years after they switched to OSX and I bought a Macbook Pro for probably 60%+ more than the equivalent PC but it lasted me over 2X as long as any PC ever had prior. Plus the free OS upgrades that were unheard of on Windows machines at the time.
maybe we’ll see the mac pro again in apple 2: the search for more money
Apple 2: the search for more money aired in 1977.
We’re WAY into the Apple Universe at this point.
On one hand, bummer. But on the other, sort of a waste of hardware anyway.
I was a big time pro user. G3 tower with DVD card, G5 dual, Mac Pro 5,1 with dual X5690’s and other upgrades. But I had to drag those systems kicking and screaming out of Apple’s walled garden to do what is second nature on the PC side of things. Loved the OS back then, but not all users were braindead drones.
“Pro” stopped being a moniker for advanced capability, instead the most expensive, least hobbled version.
I hope whomever replaces Cook (rumor has it) once again remembers what it was like to be a nerd under all that businessman authority.
Genuinely miss the old Apple, but Linux is ascendant so I’m not too mad.
This article has me thinking I’ll get the two cheese graters out of my closet. For old times’ sake.
If I were shareholder I would want answers as to what the actual hell Cook is doing right with Apple. Every decision just seems to be intentionally designed to lose money.
From all the messing around with core products, to the bizarre decisions that led to the updated vision pro, a device no one is interested in, been upgraded to the latest version of the device no one is interested in, now with tungsten. Nevertheless I’m sure the iPhone sock is going to be a rip roaring success.
They could replace him with a goldfish swimming around a tank to make decisions, and it would lead to more coherent outcomes.
Apple silicon has been a huge success. That transition had a million ways it could and should have failed but he pulled it off.
AirPods basically took over an entire market. You either have AirPods or a knockoff of the same idea. That’s basically it now.
The watch….needs some attention. Everyone has one, no one knows what it’s for. I pay for things with my watch and people are floored it could do that. I’m like “why the hell did you buy it if you didn’t know what it can do?”
The iPhone is good. It’s not great. It’s overpriced as fuck. But the product itself, even the air, is good. The latest round of software for it is a disaster though. That holds true for all of the software this release cycle. Across everything except the appleTV, things were made measurably worse.
It just so happens that Android is also getting worse. I loved Android being there to save me from Apple when they finally pissed me off enough to leave and cheer them on from the sidelines. This year, I was finally ready to make the jump and leave and then Google says they are effectively killing third party OS development and locking down the platform. Also, Gemini is going to run on everything and you can’t do anything about it. You can’t turn it off, you can only turn off your ability to interact with it directly. Because AI.
I bought another iPhone, and now I’m looking at Linux phones seriously and thinking to myself “why not?”
