This is the $2,000 Power Mac G5 from 2003,
Apple's pro PC with a modular, cheese-grater design.
And this is Phil Schiller, 10 years later.
He's about to reveal a revolutionary design
of Apple's new $3,000 Mac Pro
that looks a lot like a trash can.
Schiller: Can't innovate anymore, my a--.
[Narrator] Sure, going from a cheese grater
to a trash can might seem "innovative" to some,
but Apple didn't need to innovate the look of its Mac Pro.
It needed to make a good PC.
The 2013 Mac Pro was a classic case of form over function.
The trash can sucks namely because
it's got very little expandability.
You realize this only has four RAM slots,
the GPUs are very constrained,
and you couldn't add in anything.
Like, it was all just "set it and forget it."
And I think for a professional consumer
that just caused a lot of problems.
[Narrator] Animators, editors, and developers
who needed better performance didn't need
just high-speed Thunderbolt and external hard drives.
They needed slots to upgrade graphics cards
and add way more RAM,
which were all things the trash can lacked.
Dowley: Usually, as a computer gets a little bit older,
Apple will make small tweaks,
add in USB-C or upgrade the CPU or the GPU,
and it just seemed like Apple never cared
to update it after it was released.
[Narrator] Yep.
If you bought the trash-can Mac Pro
as recently as early 2019,
you were pretty much buying a computer
with the exact same specs as the 2013 model.
That's six years without an upgrade.
Not only did Apple not upgrade the trash can over the years,
it also didn't think about
the future thermal limitations in its design.
Schiller: The processor, graphics, memory storage
are all built around a new, unified thermal core.
Dowley: The thermal design was really cool,
but it just didn't have a lot of flexibility
for adding more heat.
Heat needed to be evenly distributed
around the whole sides of the computer
for the thermal design to work.
It meant that you could only have one CPU and two GPUs.
And it didn't really take into account modern advancements
where you had just one really big GPU
that generated a ton of heat.
[Narrator] In 2017, company officials admitted
in a meeting with a select number of journalists
that they made a mistake in their design.
As Daring Fireball reported, Schiller told the group,
"The current Mac Pro, as we've said a few times,
was constrained thermally and it restricted our ability
to upgrade it.
And for that, we're sorry
to disappoint customers who wanted that."
Six years after the release of the trash can,
Apple finally debuted its new Mac Pro at WWDC 2019.
Tim Cook: This is the new Mac Pro, and it's incredible!
[Narrator] After bragging about innovating
so hard on the trash can,
the new Mac Pro is a return
of the good ol' cheese-grater design.
It's easily upgradeable
and expandable,
and it's got a ton of power,
checks off almost every box
power users want
in a high-end machine,
and has a starting price of $6,000.
John Ternus: It is the most configurable, most expandable,
and by far the most powerful Mac we've ever made.
[Narrator] Steve Jobs always liked to quote Wayne Gretzky,
saying he skates to where the puck is going to be,
not where it is.
But the trash can wasn't Apple skating
to where the puck was going.
The company just put it somewhere on the ice
and hoped users would come to it.
Pro users, many who had supported Apple
in its most difficult times, felt abandoned and ignored
by the company's focus on design over function.
Hopefully, Apple will take the failure of the trash can
as a lesson that it still needs
to acknowledge users' wants and needs.
Now, if only it could work on the new model's pricing.