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What’s next for the chop?
As we wave goodbye to the humble MacBook, the unloved and relatively unlovely entry level laptop, is Steve Jobs's Sauron like eye focussing on another stalwart of the Mac line up for EOLing? And would this stalwart of the Mac line up be the Mac Pro. Is the Apple desktop powerhouse a machine now out of sync with Apples future?
On the face of it, the MacPro is a poor hunk of metal. It's form factor dates back to the pre historic days of the PowerMac G5. It's processors date back nearly as far and it's price tag is a brave attempt by Apple to price themselves out of their own market. To add to the Mac Pro's woes, all the markets that used to buy Apple towers have faded, only high end video and audio production remain. Designers, architects, musicians, photographers, all have generally abandoned the big one in favour of various flavours of iMac and/or laptops. Even Apple, by releasing Final Cut X have given a strong signal that they see the hot action in the lower end of the Pro market, a market that is perfectly happy with the quad core iMac as a workhorse.
There are many video and film editors as well as studio techs hanging onto their Pro's, but realistically they now represent only a tiny fraction of Apples customers. With around 2% of Mac sales being towers, they lack financial clout in a market that Apple learning is relatively small. How happy would Apple be at loosing several thousand Pro users but gaining several hundred thousand new Prosumer editors...Very happy.
Talking to a heavyweight editor, who runs a full fat eight core Pro with 32GB RAM and all the hard drives in china, the most convincing argument he could come up with for Apple keeping the Pro was that he and his colleagues were the ones supporting Apple in the dark days, surely they wouldn't abandon them now?
If the best defence you can summon for the Mac Pro line is "I'm sorry I think you owe us?" and your relying on the generosity of a modern Apple then you really should be looking for an exit strategy.
Andrew Stephens is @DrHappyMac on twitter and a regular on the Bagel Tech Mac Show
You can get hold of The Doctor on twitter or on MacandMore.co.uk
Author
Ewen Rankin