Ive had the new Mac Pro on the brain all week and I still cant decide if I think its brilliant or if Apple just wanted to make a really expensive trash can. You know the one: cylindrical, black, about the size of a coffee thermos, and Phil Schiller stood up on stage at WWDC last Monday and dropped the line thats already all over Twitter: "Cant innovate anymore, my ass." Which, fair. Say what you want about Apple but they know how to answer their critics with a straight face and a pro-am camera crew.
Im not buying one. Lets get that out of the way. Im not the target market. I dont do 4K video editing and I dont need dual GPUs humming away under my desk. But Ive been building and rebuilding PCs since I was maybe fifteen, and something about that machine has been eating at me since the keynote. Its gorgeous, genuinely, the kind of thing youd want sitting on a shelf even unplugged. But its also a sealed cylinder. No drive bays. No expansion slots in the traditional sense. Everything hangs off Thunderbolt 2 ports on the back now, which is its own kind of clever, I guess. You want more storage, you plug in a box. You want to swap the GPU, well, good luck, because from what people are saying those things arent really user-replaceable at all.
I still have my old beige tower from a phone-jack-modem era stuffed in a closet at my parents place (I should really stop calling it "old," its from like 2003, but everything from a decade ago starts to feel ancient once you own a smartphone). That thing was ugly as sin and loud enough that I could hear the fan through a closed door two rooms away. But I opened that case probably thirty times over the years. New hard drive when the old one clicked itself to death. A cheap video card upgrade so I could run Half-Life 2 without it looking like a slideshow. That kind of tinkering is basically the whole reason I got into computers in the first place, and its exactly what the new Mac Pro is telling you, politely but firmly, that you dont get to do anymore.
Which I think is sort of the actual story here and not the shiny industrial design everyone keeps posting glamour shots of. Apple has been moving this direction for years: the MacBook Airs you cant open without voiding the warranty, the iMacs with RAM soldered to the board — and the Mac Pro was the last machine in the lineup that was still, in spirit, a workstation you could crack open and modify. Now its a black tube. A beautiful black tube, I keep saying, because it really is, but a sealed one.
None of this is a huge surprise if youve been paying attention to where Apple was headed. And to be clear I dont think this makes it a bad machine — for the actual pro users its built for, the ones doing color grading on three monitors at once, the Thunderbolt daisy-chaining probably solves more problems than the lack of internal bays creates. I just dont think Ill ever feel the same way about a machine I cant get my hands dirty inside of. Theres a specific kind of satisfaction in physically installing a stick of RAM yourself, hearing it click into place, and that feeling is going away one product line at a time whether I like it or not.
Also can we talk about the fact that its going to be made in the USA? That got a genuine cheer in the room and I dont think its nothing, even if I roll my eyes a little at how its being marketed. Anyway. Its not shipping till later this year, prices arent announced, and Ill probably end up looking at photos of it in some Apple Store display case sometime around Christmas, admiring it, and then going home to my ugly desktop with the side panel already off from last weekends upgrade.