I hope that Mac Pro would be good old case with standard components without extra price. I really like macOS but all Apple's computers are just terrible for me. Mac Pro is my last hope to stay in Apple ecosystem.
Considering how long it is taking them to develop it, and considering the direction they have taken with their Emoji-keyboard MacBookPros with custom chips and now the architecture of the iMac Pro, the Mac Pro is going to be anything but standard.
But they have already developed a non-standard Mac Pro in 2013, and it is widely considered a failure. I'm not sure if they'll really make the same mistake twice?
Craig Federighi: I think it’s fair to say, part of why we’re talking today, is that the Mac Pro — the current vintage that we introduced — we wanted to do something bold and different. In retrospect, it didn’t well suit some of the people we were trying to reach. It’s good for some; it’s an amazingly quiet machine, it’s a beautiful machine. But it does not address the full range of customers we wanna reach with Mac Pro.
But I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will. We designed a system that we thought with the kind of GPUs that at the time we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two GPU architecture… that that was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But workloads didn’t materialize to fit that as broadly as we hoped.
Considering they identified one of the issues as designing themselves into a thermal corner and the next thing they do is design the iMac Pro with extreme thermal constraints too I'd be skeptical if they had learnt anything.
Modern Apple doesn't backtrack lightly, just look how they're still pushing the butterfly keyboard despite it being breakable with single specks of dust.
It was a failure because the thermal characteristics made it extremely difficult to expand. They’re not going to market something that is essentially an Apple-branded hackintosh devoid of custom components.
