Mac Pro (2013)
Alan Stonebridge looks back fondly at the beastly Mac that never really caught on…
When the current Mac Pro debuted five years ago, Apple’s high‑end desktop computer was greeted with puns about how it looked like a
bin, but also fascination. Its audacious design packs a lot of power into a small cylinder, including dual graphics cards. It’s a far cry from the behemoth tower designs that had dominated pro desktops for years.
Apple arranged components around a ‘unified thermal core’, enabling heat from them to be carried away by a single heat sink. A fan at the top pulls air in at the base, and warm air rises upwards and out at the top, enabling the fan is able to spin slower and quieter than it otherwise might have.
However, it turned out that Apple was too audacious. Earlier in this issue you’ll have read that there’s a brand-new Mac Pro on the way. Apple first hinted at this just over three years after the current design went on sale. During a round-table discussion with prominent US tech commentators in April 2017, Apple’s Phil Schiller conceded that the innovative design was also a dead end.
Apple’s Craig Federighi was reported as saying: “I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will. We designed a system with the kind of GPUs that at the time we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two GPU architecture. That was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But workloads didn’t materialise to fit that as broadly as we hoped.”
The Mac Pro has received small boosts in the Intel Xeon and graphics processors, but lags behind meaningful developments found even in the Mac mini – notably Thunderbolt 3 ports that enable easier graphics upgrades. Engineering feats and good looks weren’t enough to sustain interest in a computer that starts at £2,999.