Matthew Panzarino was invited to Apple to receive an update about Apple’s progress on the new Mac Pro:
The interviews and demos took place over the next several hours, highlighting the way that Apple is approaching upgradability, development of its pro apps and most interestingly, how it has changed its process to more fully grok how professionals actually use its products.
After an initial recap in what they’d done over the past year, including MacBooks and the iMac Pro, I was given the day’s first piece of news: the long-awaited Mac Pro update will not arrive before 2019.
Panzarino goes on, quoting Tom Boger, Senior Director of Mac Hardware Product Marketing:
“We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It’s not something for this year.”
“We know that there’s a lot of customers today that are making purchase decisions on the iMac Pro and whether or not they should wait for the Mac Pro.”
Apple has been building out what it is calling the Pro Workflow Team, which has been charged with ensuring that its pro hardware and software works well hand-in-hand, and meets the needs found out in the field:
“We’ve gone from just you know engineering Macs and software to actually engineering a workflow and really understanding from soup to nuts, every single stage of the process, where those bottlenecks are, where we can optimize that,” says Boger.
One more Boger quote:
We’re getting a much much much deeper understanding of our pro customers and their workflows and really understanding not only where the state of the art is today but where the state of the art is going and all of that is really informing the work that we’re doing on the Mac Pro and we’re working really really hard on it.”
I like this approach, and I think it shows Apple is taking the needs of users like me seriously. And with an iMac Pro on my desk quietly making my work smoother than ever, I’m totally fine waiting until 2019 to see what Apple has up its sleeve. Then again, this speaks to me, too.
This news comes at an interesting time. While Apple never said the new Mac Pro would be a 2018 product, I truly believe there would have been Great Nerd Angst if WWDC came and went without any news on this front.
There’s also the increased rumors around ARM-powered Macs. Like with the Intel transition, Apple’s pro products will surely be the last to make this move. It may be that 2019-ish Mac Pro will be the Intel Mac’s swan song.