The 2019 Mac Pro’s main purpose was to provide much needed reassurance that Apple cared about the Mac. In prior years the quality of the Macs had fallen over all product lines. And the question of does Apple care about the Mac at all was a legitimate one.
This Mac Pro was about resetting and giving a clear signal that Apple was willing to invest in the Mac far more than it was about ‘slots’.
Today, Mac hardware is the best it has ever been, and no one is reasonably questioning apple’s commitment to a Mac hardware.
So it makes sense for the Mac Pro to make a graceful exit.
I also think Apple wasn’t sure 5 years ago that a product like the Mac Studio would be accepted by the market. Memories of the G4 Cube and all…
But it’s a great product, does fulfill the bulk of needs for most “Pro” desktop use cases, and what’s left isn’t interesting or profitable enough to sustain a separate product line.
I really hope they do something bigger than this to mark the occasion. I know that culturally they don’t like to look backwards. But there is a lot to look back on and this is the time to do it. 50 years of Apple is 50 years of personal computing after all…
I honestly don’t know the attribution. Was told the quote in school when being taught on the spirit of Hemingway’s writing and tasked with rewriting a story into only 5 sentences.
Add to this that the Apple IIe had two keys with the Apple logo on them. One just an outline ‘open Apple’ and one a silhouette ‘closed Apple’. These two keys did different things to each other!
The open and closed apple keys first appeared on the Apple ///, initially next to each other on the left of the spacebar. On the Apple /// plus, the closed apple then moved to the right of the keyboard, which is what the Apple IIe inherited.
The closed apple key then appeared on the Lisa keyboard alongside an option key (both on the left of the spacebar), but the Lisa's closed Apple key acted like and is what became the Mac's command key.
Just to clarify, my point was that the construction usage is not niche.
But anyway if you continue along your path of reasoning and discount all use cases one by one you end up with no product at all… or maybe a photo/video player and messaging device. But as proven by the construction and many other use cases the iPad is more than that.
i bought a magic keyboard for my 11" ipad pro and ultimately didn't use it much. it does have a traditional laptop-style hinge, but the way the ipad mounts to the case brings it forward over the keyboard more than with a regular laptop. the hinge also doesn't allow for a very wide range of motion (even compared to macbooks). finally, the center of gravity is really high compared to a laptop which makes it awkward to use as a literal laptop or when lying down.
it definitely looks cool (i could see the design having been inspired by the OG Mac and 20th Anniversary Mac) but works best on a stable surface; plus if you want to use it purely as a tablet, you're left with a big clunky keyboard case to deal with.
the idea of a laptop/tablet combo is cool but i haven't seen the concept executed very successfully from either starting point.
the point of that hinge, besides weight distribution, is to make it easy to reach and touch the bottom of the screen, and so that it's not fully perpendicular to your finger.
and that particular subproblem of using a tablet as a notebook - it solves it well! but it's still a little weird when you try to use it like a laptop. maybe this is a cop-out but it definitely feels like a product that would not have passed the Jobs test in its current form.
You would be correct. If the ipad let you use full osx it would be pretty attractive to me and I probably would have spent the 5 minutes needed to discover the magic keyboard, but unfortunately the idea of buying a computing device with such insanely powerful hardware but being locked into standard tablet UX really doesn't excite me.
I’ve often had similar thoughts but in my mind it tends to be windows XP/Mac OS 10.3 ish. Those systems were super capable and responsive, but the web moved at a slower pace. A good balance between computing power and humanity.
This Mac Pro was about resetting and giving a clear signal that Apple was willing to invest in the Mac far more than it was about ‘slots’.
Today, Mac hardware is the best it has ever been, and no one is reasonably questioning apple’s commitment to a Mac hardware.
So it makes sense for the Mac Pro to make a graceful exit.
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