You have to wonder how clueless someone has to be to write something this stupid, particularly someone who does an Apple-centric podcast that features intelligent and thoughtful guests. It would be someone who regularly has Dildo on and whose other podcast is completely retarded insane a little weird.
The question of whether the Mac Pro might be on its way out is even more stupid than wondering if the Mac Mini might be dying. Even ignoring the fact that the Mac market is growing by leaps and bounds, the fact is that the Mac Pro is a niche product, by design. Yes, the high-end iMac will take a few sales of low-end Mac Pros away, and that’s probably the point. I think that its easier to upsell people to a Core i7 iMac from an Core 2 Duo than it is to upsell someone from an iMac to a Mac Pro. Apple probably feels that the only people who should be buying Mac Pros are people who actually need them. Would I like a spec’ed up Mac Pro? Hell yeah! Do I need one? Not so much.
Nothing I do with my computers is really workstation-class computing. I don’t crunch huge datasets in massive, multi-GB databases that I keep in memory using the 64-bit kernel. I do 3D rendering, but only now and then, and only just for fun. I write software, which needs to get compiled, but I’m not very good at it and the stuff I compile doesn’t really tax my 2006 Macbook Pro that much. The fact is that very, very few people need a Mac Pro, and most of them are already Apple customers.
Most of Apple’s new market share is coming from Windows customers, who are used to junky, low-end garbage running an eight year old OS. These people are NOT Mac Pro users. These people buy Macbooks (maybe a Pro here and there) and iMacs. From what I’ve heard, PC people who buy Mac Minis tend to be software devs who want a cheap and easy way to try out The Apple Way or write iPhone software without a big investment. As for Mac people, the same is generally true as well. While I wouldn’t exactly complain if a free Mac Pro showed up on my doorstep, I’m not going to be buying one soon, if ever. In case anyone cares, my future upgrade plans involve a pair of 13″ Macbook Pros for myself and my fiance, a Mac Mini server and maybe a 27″ iMac. The Pro never really entered into my thought process. Again, this is by design.
None of this is secret, hard to find or even really hard to figure out. The fact that a professional Apple pundit would write something so stupid would boggle the mind if not for the fact that computer pundits tend to be stupid in general. As usual, some of the best thoughts about where the new iMacs live in Apple’s lineup come from a non-pundit. Marco Arment wonders aloud if Apple is trying to make desktops desirable again. He even points out that the new iMac is priced such that a Mac Pro could use it as a display that’s superior to the 30″ Cinema Display and then have a whole extra high-end computer bolted to the back that they’ll have to figure out what to do with.
While I could think of a few things to do with that much extra iMac, I don’t think that’s the point. I think Apple’s just doing what they’ve done before when they updated the Macbooks right before the Pros got a serious update. I’m pretty sure that we’re going to see new Mac Pros rather soon, along with a long-overdue update to the Cinema Displays. People get too stuck on certain things, like raw market share. Just like how Ballmer likes his company’s logo on cheap shit, as long as there’s a lot of units, people think that low-volume Macs count as a failure. However, Apple isn’t afraid of niche products, as long as they’re profitable. The niche that Apple likes to play in the most is content creation, which the Mac Pro is best at. The Mac Pro isn’t going away any time soon, and anyone who says otherwise just isn’t paying attention.