Daring Fireball has a story about Apple sharing their plans for the future of the Mac Pro. It is weird to communicate with Pro users via a blogger, but what the hell: it’s Apple.

Apple are working on new Mac Pros with a completely new design, but they won’t ship “this year” and there’s no firm commitment to shipping them in 2018 either. In the meantime, they have processor bumped the existing machines but without USB-C and thus without LG 5K monitor support.

My gut reaction is relief. At least they are working on it and they haven’t whole sale abandoned Pro users. There’s also hints about new Pro displays and new iMacs.

It is also nice to see that Apple has realized that the existing Mac Pro design is a complete failure. Dual GPUs are no good, integrated components and a small form factor are incompatible with fast, low cost updates. They are talking about a “modular system” now.

All things said, however, nobody outside of Apple ever thought that their new Mac Pros were anything other than the product of a deranged mind and it took them nearly 3 years to acknowledge that. Furthermore, a “modular” system is exactly what the original Mac Pro and all but its latest incarnation already were. Building this fabled new modular Mac Pro is thus as easy as slapping an industry-standard motherboard with dual Xeons into the old Mac Pro enclosure and supporting it in software. There is literally nothing to it. If they don’t like the old cheese grater enclosure just spray it Jet Black already.

All this makes me worry about what that “new” direction is: worryingly there has been no acknowledgement that a Mac Pro needs dual CPUs. There’s only talk about dual GPUs, which nobody has asked for. Are they going to mess it up by overthinking it again?

All I want is a significantly faster Mac. Something that beats my no longer supported 2009 Mac Pro.. and it’s not hard to deliver now.