Apple is Questioning the Future of the Mac Pro?

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Posted October 31, 2011 at 10:25pm by iClarified

Apple is reportedly evaluating whether or not to keep its Mac Pro workstation alive beyond this year despite having already created a revision to the current design, according to AppleInsider.

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.

The new Mac Pro had previously been expected to utilize a new generation of Sandy Bridge desktop CPUs and feature a rack mountable design.

Apple is Questioning the Future of the Mac Pro?

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Juan - November 1, 2011 at 7:00pm

Maybe Its Just For The regular consumers that will get the axe, with current technology I don't see any problems for the consumer pro editing, animating, or postproducing in a beef up iMac.. I'm doing a 12mts x 4mts image in ps cs5 in a laptop hp tx2000 amd turion64 x2 with some slowdowns but nothing annoying.. And this is my travel win7x64 laptop from like two years ago.. Any modern pro studio will use massive render stations with sun, Linux, or win...So I think it's not that needed to have pros as consumer products as right now, sad they will be gone, but maybe they will be available by special order only.. Time will tell

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Dirty D - November 1, 2011 at 1:20pm

Pro apps for iMac only...really? Oh wait FCP X is just iMovie pro, soooo... I guess that works...lol...fail

Going in the flow !!! - November 1, 2011 at 12:43pm

When Xserve was discontinued, all the Gurus out there knew that next one is the Pro that will be axed. You know this thing that, Apple is moving out of the Pro business and only want to focus on the consumer products... all with the 'i'. Apple is heading on right note on becoming more rich. All things that go up has to come down one day. Now they are greedy and least bothered about how exactly their products used in Pro business.

Philipo - October 31, 2011 at 11:02pm

Don't let the customers down who helped survive Apple the daysit didn't so great. I think this would be a big MISTAKE, Apple is losing it's imago, mark my words, in a few year when Google or HTC is making an Phone better than the iPhone Apple is not so cool anymore, just time that's all!

Noman - November 1, 2011 at 5:29am

Probably he is saying that PROs kept Apple Alive all the hard years - so it would be unfair to abandon that market now - or in future. I don't either like that Apple would be consumer only - they need the PRO, to keep the image as superbly machines that can make 2hour badass animated movies, not just toys for public.

Locutus - November 1, 2011 at 6:13am

When you say "2 hour badass animated movies", are you referring to Pixar's animated movies? If so, you do realize that Pixar, until recently, didn't use Macs in production. Historically, Macs were only used at Pixar for office tasks. Pixar primarily uses Linux, Sun Microsystems, and Windows based workstations in the production if their movies. Only recently, this year in fact, has Pixar began bringing Macs into film production. But, of course, if Apple discontinues the Mac Pro, Pixar will probably not become an all Mac Pro animation production studio. FYI.