So WWDC happened this week, and I know the internet is already drowning in iOS 7 screenshots and hot takes about whether flat design is genius or just Jony Ive erasing everything Scott Forstall ever touched out of spite. I don't really care about that today. I want to talk about the Mac Pro, because that thing is the strangest object Apple has shipped in years and I can't stop thinking about it.
You've probably seen it by now. It's a black cylinder, about the size of a big thermos, with a mirrored top like some kind of Bond villain prop. No visible screws. No drive bays you can get at. The whole machine is built around a single triangular aluminum core that all the heat-generating parts bolt onto, cooled by one fan pulling air up through the middle. Phil Schiller stood on stage and said, and I'm quoting this because it's honestly the best line to come out of a keynote in ages, "can't innovate anymore, my ass." That's a direct response to months of tech blogs (guilty, probably, at some point) writing pieces about how Apple had lost its edge post-Jobs. Fair play, Phil.
Here's my actual problem with it though, and it's not the shape. I like the shape. I think it's a genuinely ballsy piece of industrial design for a workstation, which is normally the most boring category of computer that exists. My problem is that they showed us this beautiful little monolith, walked us through the dual FirePro GPUs and the Thunderbolt 2 ports and the PCIe flash storage, and then just... didn't tell us what it costs. Not a number. Not a starting price. Nothing. We got a release window of "later this year" and a promise that it's assembled in the US, which is a nice detail if you care about that stuff (I do, a little), but I left that segment of the keynote with zero idea whether this is a $2500 machine or a $6000 one. Given the guts they're describing, I'd bet on the higher end, and I say that as someone who will absolutely not be buying one.
Because that's the other thing nobody's really saying out loud: this computer has no expansion slots. None. The whole pitch is that instead of opening the case and sticking in more drives or cards like every Mac Pro before it, you're supposed to hang everything off it externally over Thunderbolt. Which is fine in theory, I guess, if Thunderbolt peripherals weren't still stupidly expensive and kind of rare on shelves right now. It's a beautiful, self-contained sculpture of a computer that's betting hard on an ecosystem that doesn't fully exist yet. That's either visionary or it's a trash can shaped mistake, and honestly ask me again in two years.
The software side got the bigger reaction obviously, and I'll admit the new OS X naming thing amused me more than it should have. Ten years of big cats, Lion, Mountain Lion, Snow Leopard, all of it, and now they're naming it Mavericks after a surfing spot up near Half Moon Bay. Somebody in Cupertino apparently just ran out of cats, or got tired of the joke, and picked a wave break instead. I have no strong feelings about Mavericks as an OS yet because none of us have actually used it, but I do appreciate that Apple's naming scheme is now, canonically, California landmarks. Next year it's probably going to be a state park.
iOS 7 I'll leave alone for now. Everyone else is already covering the flat icons and the parallax wallpaper thing to death, and my opinion on it will probably change three more times before it actually ships in the fall anyway. First reactions to a total visual overhaul are almost never the reactions that stick.
One more small thing before I close the laptop. My current desk setup already has zero room for a cylinder the size of a trash can sitting next to my monitor, and I say that as someone who works from a spare bedroom with a door that doesn't fully close. If Apple ships this thing at the price I'm guessing, my 2010 Mac Mini and I are going to be just fine for a while longer.