Despite new CPU options, Apple reportedly questioning future of Mac Pro

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Despite new CPU options, Apple reportedly questioning future of Mac Pro

Despite the coming availability of a new generation of Sandy Bridge desktop CPUs suitable for advancing Apple's Mac Pro line, the company has reportedly been evaluating whether to continue to invest in furthering its full-sized workstation line beyond this year in the face of limited sales.

Although the Mac maker has reportedly developed a revision to the existing Mac Pro that may or may not see the light of day, people familiar with the matter said management as far back as May of 2011 were in limbo over whether to pour any additional resources into the product line.

According to these people, the consensus among sales executives for the Cupertino-based company was that the Mac Pro's days -- at least in its current form -- were inevitably numbered. In particular, internal discussions were said to focus around the fact that sales of the high-end workstations to both consumers and enterprises have dropped off so considerably that the Mac Pro is no longer a particularly profitable operation for Apple.

Another point reportedly raised during the discussions was that the advent of Apple's multi-use, high-speed Thunderbolt technology will ultimately allow other, more popular members of the Mac product family to assume the vast majority of the roles that once required the Mac Pro's and flexibility and architecture.

As it stands, notebooks currently make up a 74 percent share of the Apple's computer sales, according to sales figures and comments made by chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer in the company's latest quarterly earnings conference call this month.

Quarterly Mac sales just set an all time record of 4.89 million units; the company noted that while desktops are an increasingly small proportion of overall sales, there were still record sales of desktops, represented primarily by the iMac.

At the same time, Apple made no comment of the sales or future of its Mac Pro line of full sized desktop systems, the only machines it continues to sell with internal PCI Express expansion slots. However, over the last year Apple has deployed Thunderbolt to all of its notebooks, iMac and the Mac mini. Thunderbolt provides the same signals as PCI Express slots over a high speed external interconnect.

Armed with Thunderbolt, Apple's notebooks and consumer desktops can accommodate fast external storage, multiple external displays and specialized peripheral devices, even connect to external housings that supply conventional PCI Express slots for expansion cards, negating one of the primary unique features of the Mac Pro.

Apple's existing iMac and Mac mini designs can't accommodate the fastest, high end processors and graphics that the Mac Pro can, but there appears to be an increasingly limited market for high end desktops, particularly in comparison to the mass market sales Apple is seeing with its iOS devices like the iPad (which now outnumbers all Mac sales combined), as well as the company's more consumer-oriented notebook and desktop Macs.

Apple could choose to offer a new high-end iMac or beefed up Mac mini that packs enough power to approach the performance current Mac Pro, greatly simplifying its product lineup while having a very limited impact on sales. That would save the company the efforts of having to design and maintain a tower system.

Several months ago, Apple began to retreat slightly on its Mac Pro sales efforts when it ceased regular shipments of the $4,999 12-core to channel partners. Only a handful of the company's U.S.-based authorized resellers continue to list the product as a special order item, while others have pulled the configuration from their product database entirely. Those who have kept the model in their systems, like Amazon, have for months listed the configuration as "currently unavailable," advising customers that it doesn't "know when or if this item will be back in stock."

Selling what people buy

A year ago, the company similarly abandoned sales of the Xserve in response to limited sales, after first backing away from the server market by discounting the Xserve RAID.

Apple has since recommended the Mac Pro as an alternative to the Xserve, but has also introduced a limited duty server model of the Mac mini. This summer, Apple released Mac OS X Lion Server as a $50 package in the Mac App Store, signaling an intent to continue its server product but aim it at a "prosumer" home/office audience, with easier to configure software that lacks some of the previous version's sophistication and complexity.

As AppleInsider exclusively reported last summer, the company similarly retargeted its high end Final Cut Pro to serve a more mass market prosumer audience, allowing it to add major architectural improvements to the software while making it more approachable and more affordable to the mainstream pool of customers who were actually buying it.

Source: AppleInsider

[Vice]

It would sell better if they made a version that came with a Core i7 instead of a XEON. It has priced itself out of the market.

[Xtreme $niper]

It would sell better if they made a version that came with a Core i7 instead of a XEON. It has priced itself out of the market.

I think they did for a while, but I suppose they dropped it because people who want a Core i7 would probably end up buying an iMac instead (so long as they weren't interested in the PCI Express expansion slots that are slowly becoming less meaningful as the article mentions).

[.Neo]

I think they did for a while [...]

No, they didn't. All Mac Pros to date are equipped with Intel Xeon chips.

[neufuse Veteran]

Mac Pro is a sweet design for a system, problem is they charge way too much for it! and they barely even market it.... its like the Xserve, it wasn't marketed enough then they killed it off due to low sales... Mac Pro has an elitest vibe to it.... the average user doesnt need RAID controllers, fibre channels etc..... but some people like towers since you can expand and upgrade them, they need a home user version of it.....

but then this to me feels more like apple wants to kill the expansion market and do complete control over the hardware.... nothing goes in, everything attaches via thunderbolt or something like that...

[AJerman]

They charge too much for it because it's a high end workstation system, and that's what it's place is. Now days laptops are so fast, they can take care of nearly all general computing tasks, and higher end laptops can replace most workstations, including light photo and video editing work. If you need a desktop with a little more power, there's the iMac line which is Apple's primary desktop system these days. The Mac Pro takes the professional high end workstation line, and while it may not sell as well, I think they'd be missing out on a big market by dropping it. A lot of very high end video editing takes place on Mac Pros. I'm not sure what they would suggest their high end video production clients use without the Mac Pro.

The problem is that the line is expensive, and limited in it's audience, but Apple has long been known as a favorite for high end image and video editing, so if they drop the line, they drop those customers. I'm not sure how profitable the Mac Pro line is, but I would think it's customers are not ones that Apple wants to lose. It's a tough business decision.

[threetonesun]

I think the point of the article is that any of the add-on features of the Mac Pro could be connected via Thunderbolt to an iMac. I know someone is working on an external Thunderbolt GPU, if technology like that advances, you could use a laptop that docks into a monitor and better GPU for everything.

[Chasethebase Reporter]

They could try and make a specced out machine that was somewhere in the region of ?1.5k which would work very well, at present ?2k is well out. If it were priced at ?1k the iMac would compete with it, which wouldn't work at all.

[Bad Boy Nibbler]

It would sell better if they made a version that came with a Core i7 instead of a XEON. It has priced itself out of the market.

amen brother something we all hope but will never likely happen

none the less a lot of users on mac rumours are taking this is half baked not going to happen rumour

[Motoko.]

Mac Pro is a sweet design for a system, problem is they charge way too much for it! and they barely even market it.... its like the Xserve, it wasn't marketed enough then they killed it off due to low sales... Mac Pro has an elitest vibe to it.... the average user doesnt need RAID controllers, fibre channels etc..... but some people like towers since you can expand and upgrade them, they need a home user version of it.....

but then this to me feels more like apple wants to kill the expansion market and do complete control over the hardware.... nothing goes in, everything attaches via thunderbolt or something like that...

This, you can't have a market for such a system when consumers have the power to build a hackintosh with similar specs and costs 3x less

[.Neo]

This, you can't have a market for such a system when consumers have the power to build a hackintosh with similar specs and costs 3x less

You won't find many professionals or companies that rely heavily on a stable system use a "Hackintosh".

[protocol7]

Xserve

Final Cut Pro

OS X Server

Mac Pro

Anyone see the pattern yet?

Apple has long needed a cheaper tower offering than the Mac Pro. There's just too much of a price hike from iMac to Mac Pro for many.

[PyX]

Mac Pro is a sweet design for a system, problem is they charge way too much for it!

Honestly, I tried with about 3-4 different PC suppliers back in the time to build my own Hackintosh Pro and most of the time the PC was $50-100 more expensive, and sometimes the Mac Pro was $50 more expensive? Its price definitely follows the market.

[Billmaster]

I'm sticking with Apple needs to release OS11. OSX was cool until Windows 7.

[PGHammer]

Mac Pro is a sweet design for a system, problem is they charge way too much for it! and they barely even market it.... its like the Xserve, it wasn't marketed enough then they killed it off due to low sales... Mac Pro has an elitest vibe to it.... the average user doesnt need RAID controllers, fibre channels etc..... but some people like towers since you can expand and upgrade them, they need a home user version of it.....

but then this to me feels more like apple wants to kill the expansion market and do complete control over the hardware.... nothing goes in, everything attaches via thunderbolt or something like that...

Apple had a system similar to the Mac Pro prior to their switch to Intel CPUs - it was the Quadra, and it was, justifiably, the uber-Mac back then.

However, they also had the Performa, which used a large number of the peripherals of the Quadra (in the case of the higher-end models, it even used the Quadra's case and a similar, but lower-clocked CPU).

So why not a Performa for the twenty-first century?

I7-2600K (or even i5-2500K) CPU

4 GB standard (8 and 16 GB options)

SATA optical drive and 1 TB (also SATA) HDD - both standard; optical drive supports all recordable/rewritable DVD formats (option adds BD media support, both read and record)

Same GPU list as Mac Pro today

Case from Mac Pro

Code name - Performa II

You won't find many professionals or companies that rely heavily on a stable system use a "Hackintosh".

You won't find many professionals or companies that rely heavily on a stable system use a "Hackintosh".

And you know perfectly well why - this is the aftermath of the killing of what legal clones there were.

These groups are now well and true hostaged to Apple - and while it is certainly good for Apple, how is it good for them?

[cooky560 Veteran]

Xserve

Final Cut Pro

OS X Server

Mac Pro

Anyone see the pattern yet?

Yup and it's not looking good for Apple's original market

[.Neo]

I'm sticking with Apple needs to release OS11. OSX was cool until Windows 7.

Because the only thing that counts is the version number right? Forget about looking at actual features and technologies implemented.

[Billmaster]

A brand new GUI! Features? They just take more away. No Rosetta for example.

[123456789A]

My Mac Pro experience was alright except for a few things...

1) bad heat management drastically reduced the lifespan of a lot of hardware inside the tower (3 video cards and several hard drives)

2) lack of video options/overcharge by Apple, $300+ for a 3 year old replacement card

3) Apple trying to charge me $30 for a screw that was missing from one of the hard drive sleds

4) Apple requiring me to bring the entire machine in to an Apple store to add a bluetooth module

5) initial firmware problems that took half a year to be fixed by Apple

[.Neo]

A brand new GUI! Features? They just take more away. No Rosetta for example.

Not sure why you're under the assumption that Mac OS needs to jump to version 11 in order to receive a brand new look. Beyond that Aqua has been completely revised in OS X Lion.

After 5 years I can understand Apple dropping PPC support completely. Beyond that every major version of Windows dropped features as well.

[Chicane-UK Veteran]

They charge an obscene amount for it, and equip it without out of date hardware - and then wonder why it doesn't sell. Not exactly rocket science, is it...

I know that those who dislike Apple and rant about them might argue that's been their business plan for the Mac for the last few years and it seems to have worked well enough there - but I guess the Mac Pro is that step too far in terms of price.

The problem is the iMac was (and probably still is) without doubt the best "all in one" system of it's type, and the Mac Mini was packaged so well that it was hard to buy anything that competed. The Mac Pro doesn't really offer anything that you can't get anywhere else, except the enclosure which is gorgeous - I have a PowerMac G5 which is now more than 5 years old and I still think that enclosure is as good as any other desktop sized tower on the market.

[cooky560 Veteran]

the iMac isn't over priced when you consider the price of the screen included. Apple obviously want the mac pro to die or they'd make it more appealing, simple.

[P!P]

Update the Mac Pro to Sandy Bridge-E and reduce the price to about $1,799 and watch it sell. The $2,499 starting price is so ridiculous for mostly outdated technology that would cost about $500 to buy. There definitely is a pro market out there for Macs. I wish Apple would understand they are shafting them.

[philcruicks]

I think the price jump is the biggest problem, its like ?1000 from the base iMac to the base Mac Pro. I much prefer PC's over laptops for expandability and customisation.

The iMac is good, but not being able to add any extra HDD's or an extra screen is just a pain, I'd love a mac pro so I can have dual screen and have expandibility, but I'm never gonna pay ?2000 for a computer.

I agree it needs to come down in price, maybe to about ?1300 with a good i7 rather than a xenon.

[cooky560 Veteran]

What's stopping you having dual screens with the imac, it had a display port out and you can connect thunderbolt monitors to the new ones also