For years, Apple let its relatively ancient trashcan Mac Pro languish on the sidelines without any updates. Indeed, Apple’s seeming ambivalence with respect to the Mac Pro led many to believe that Apple might axe the product altogether. In turn, a narrative claiming that Apple no longer cared about its demographic of pro users and creative professionals quickly emerged and began to take hold.
In an effort to assure the Mac faithful that Apple hasn’t forgotten about its pro users, Apple last year invited a handful of journalists down to Cupertino where a number of executives — including Phil Schiller — revealed that Apple was working on a brand new Mac Pro design.
“With regards to the Mac Pro,” Schiller explained at the time, “we are in the process of what we call ‘completely rethinking the Mac Pro’. We’re working on it. We have a team working hard on it right now, and we want to architect it so that we can keep it fresh with regular improvements, and we’re committed to making it our highest-end, high-throughput desktop system, designed for our demanding pro customers.”
The news was music to many people’s ears, though Apple, in typical fashion, didn’t provide us with any sort of timeline as to when this new Mac Pro might see the light of day. Indeed, Schiller added that Apple’s Mac Pro team was instructed to come up with something truly great as opposed to focusing on coming up with a product as soon as possible in order to meet some arbitrary deadline.
Consequently, there’s been a bit of speculation as to when Apple’s new Mac Pro will hit store shelves, with some of the more optimistic users holding out for a launch sometime in 2018. Alas, it turns out that anyone eagerly anticipating a next-gen Mac Pro will have to wait until 2019 to see what Apple has been cooking up in its secretive lab.
Recently, Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch was invited to Apple’s new spaceship campus for an update on Apple’s “renewed pro product strategy.” There, Apple senior director of Mac hardware product marketing Tom Boger said that the highly anticipated machine will, in fact, ship sometime in 2019.
“We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product,” Boger told Panzarino. “It’s not something for this year.”
Interestingly enough, we also learn that Apple in recent years created a team focused solely on developing Pro level hardware and software.
Now, it’s a year later and Apple has created a team inside the building that houses its pro products group. It’s called the Pro Workflow Team and they haven’t talked about it publicly before today. The group is under John Ternus and works closely with the engineering organization.
Moreover, the Pro Workflow Team works closely with creative professionals to ensure that the company’s products more adequately suit the needs of the broader professional community.
“We’ve gone from just you know engineering Macs and software to actually engineering a workflow and really understanding from soup to nuts, every single stage of the process, where those bottlenecks are, where we can optimize that,” says Boger.
“We’re getting a much much much deeper understanding of our pro customers and their workflows and really understanding not only where the state of the art is today but where the state of the art is going and all of that is really informing the work that we’re doing on the Mac Pro and we’re working really really hard on it.”
The entire piece is well worth a read and can be viewed over here. Suffice it to say, Apple has certainly not forgotten about developers and creative professionals.
