Apple has created quite a few failed products in their lifetime, including the Newton MessagePad,
Power Mac G4 Cube, and iPod Hi-Fi. But perhaps their most consequential failure was the 2013
Mac Pro, nicknamed the trash can Mac because of its striking resemblance to the average
office trash bin. And today that just may be the best use for one of these machines,
since they failed to meet the expectations of pro users who’ve always been the Mac Pro’s
target demographic since the product debuted in 2006. So in this video we’re going to find out
what caused the Mac Pro to fail and why it was so devastating to Apple and pro users alike.
This is Greg with Apple Explained and I want to thank Squarespace for sponsoring this
video. If you want to help decide which topics I cover, make sure you’re subscribed
and voting polls like this one will show up in your mobile activity feed.
Now all of the reasons why the 2013 Mac Pro failed can be traced back to one fatal flaw: it’s design.
Apple has a reputation of creating incredible-looking hardware that’s
even been featured in museums. In fact, the design team at Apple is known for having the
most influence over product development. Typically the engineering or manufacturing
teams have that level of control. And while a design-driven company has it benefits,
it also has drawbacks. You know how Apple’s power cables split open and fray super easily?
It’s because they don’t have a strain relief, since the design team thought it looked too ugly.
And that same emphasis on form over function caused all sorts of issues with the Mac Pro.
So what exactly was wrong with its design? Well, it was eight times smaller than the
previous model. And while Apple bragged about this during its introduction, the reality was
less space meant less expandability. If you wanted to add hard drives or DVD drives to
expand your Mac Pro’s capabilities, they had to be connected externally with a thunderbolt cable.
And you can see how messy someone’s desk could become when they don’t have extra space inside
the machine, where things are neatly organized. But this wasn’t just a matter of aesthetics,
it also effected the product’s longevity. Since the 2013 Mac Pro wasn’t nearly as upgradable,
that meant the technology inside the machine would become outdated faster than before. And
while this may not sound like a big deal, since most Mac users don’t worry about
upgrading components in their MacBook Air, the situation for pro users is completely different.
When you’re spending in some cases tens of thousands of dollars on a pro-level computer,
you expect to get your money’s worth and use that machine for much longer
than a $1,000 MacBook. And that’s the biggest mistake Apple made when designing the Mac Pro.
For some reason they were trying to make it smaller, lighter, and more compact,
as if they were creating a notebook. When in reality, that’s not what pro-consumers are looking
for in a computer, since it’s often sitting on the ground anyway. They need something that’s going to
deliver the most power and expandability for their money. Something the Mac Pro was severely lacking.
And something else most pro-consumers need is their own website. Which, of course,
you should build with Squarespace. I actually started using Squarespace years ago to create
appleexplained.com, and I chose their platform since it has a super easy-to-use
drag and drop interface and the most website templates to choose from compared to any other
site builder. But what I thought was really cool is that I could add an e-commerce store
to my site when I was selling merch a couple years ago, without starting over from scratch.
Plus the payment processor was built in and I could print shipping labels straight from
Squarespace. But you can sell more than physical items, it’s also possible to sell digital items
like eBooks and Music, or services if you’re a consultant or fitness coach. It really is
an all-in-one platform designed to do almost anything you can imagine. And you can get all
this for cheaper than you might think, especially if you use the link squarespace.com/appleexplained
since you’ll get 10% off your first purchase, you can find that link in the description.
Alright now another big issue caused by the Mac Pro’s compact design, was heat. You ever notice
how gaming notebooks are typically the thickest, biggest, heaviest models on the shelf? That’s
because they’re equip with high-performance graphics cards and processors that generate
way more heat than an average notebook. So to keep those components from overheating, lots
of fans are added over a larger surface area. And we saw the same thing with Apple’s Mac Pro tower,
it was a big box of high-performance parts with eight fans to keep everything cool.
But when they decided to stuff all of those components in a space one-eighth the size,
Apple had to invent a completely new thermal technology. They called it, the unified thermal
core, and claimed it efficiently shared thermal capacity across all the processors.
And since it only used one fan, the Mac Pro was as quiet as the Mac mini. But there was one problem,
the new cooling system was designed to accommodate a dual GPU setup, which Apple
thought would best serve pro-consumer’s needs. But things didn’t pan out that way,
as demand grew for a powerful single GPU architecture. And that’s when the Mac Pro
hit a roadblock. It didn’t have space for expansion, and it didn’t have the thermal
capacity for higher performance graphics. Making it a very poor choice for pro-users.
But there was another component to the Mac Pro’s release that made it even more damaging than
other failed Apple products, since it came at a crucial moment in the company’s history.
Steve Jobs had just left Apple and passed away two years earlier, and for many people,
Tim Cook hadn’t yet proved himself as a worthy replacement. Mainly because they saw him as a
business manager instead of a product visionary like Jobs. And this earned Apple a lot of
criticism that they were no longer innovative and they were doomed to fail since Jobs left in 2011,
just like what happened when he left in 1985. And while that may sound ridiculous today, it
was a very common sentiment back then, and caused people to closely monitor Tim Cook’s every move.
So what does this have to do with the Mac Pro? Well when it was first revealed during a sneak
peak at Apple’s 2013 WWDC, Phil Schiller said this, “can’t innovate anymore my ass.”
Yeah, so that’s pretty embarrassing considering what we know about the product now. And once
customers recognized the Mac Pro’s limitations, they took it as evidence that Apple really didn’t
care about the professional market anymore since they completely lost sight of those users needs.
Which brings me to my next point. The 2013 Mac Pro was the second generation model,
with the first being introduced in 2006. That’s a gap of seven years where professional customers
were waiting to buy their next machine. It was the longest Apple has ever took to release a next-gen
pro-level desktop. And it actually sparked rumors that the Mac Pro might be discontinued, with Apple
focusing instead on more popular and profitable mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad.
That’s why Apple revealed the Mac Pro early as a sneak peek, something they rarely do,
to prove that they were still focused on serving the pro market. But that backfired once people
began using the machine themselves, since it turned out to be a bad fit for most pro users.
This led to even more criticism that Tim Cook didn’t know what he was doing as CEO,
and wasn’t capable of making great products. Apple eventually recognized they took the Mac
Pro in the wrong direction, and had a sort’ve do-over in 2017. Schiller admitted the machine
needed to be modular, and that their team was, quote, “completely rethinking the
Mac Pro.” Although it was less of a rethinking and more of a return to the way it was before.
In early 2018 Apple finally introduced the third generation Mac Pro, which did featured a large
modular design with three fans, and proved to be the best pro machine Apple has ever made.
Alright guys thanks for watching till the end, don’t forget to subscribe to
help decide which topics I cover, and I’ll see you in the next video.