✔️ 2022-04-04 18:40:00 – Paris/France.
Five years ago, the Mac lineup was in bad shape. More than three years had passed since Apple redesigned the Mac Pro with a sleek but constrained "trash can" case, while the iMac, MacBook Air and Mac mini had also gone years without updates.
A preview of the MacRumors Buyer's Guide from April 4, 2017:
At the time, some users began to wonder if Apple was still committed to the Mac, especially at the higher end of the market.
The criticism eventually led Apple to set up a meeting with a small group of journalists, where he apologized to professional Mac users and ensured he remained committed to the Mac. In a rare and surprising move, Apple also announced ahead of time that it was working on a "completely redesigned" Mac Pro with a modular design, a new pro-level iMac, and a new pro display.
The meeting, which was made public five years ago today, involved former Apple marketing director Phil Schiller, software engineering director Craig Federighi and then vice president of hardware engineering , John Ternus. One of the reporters in the room was John Gruber, and the quotes that follow are from his Bold Fireball blanket.
Schiller's apology to Mac Pro users:
The current Mac Pro, as we've said many times, was thermally limited and that limited our ability to upgrade it. And for that, we're sorry to disappoint customers who wanted that, and asked the team to go re-architect and design something big for the future that Mac Pro customers who want more extensibility, more scalability in the future. It will meet more of those needs.
Federighi's admission that Apple had designed itself into a 'thermal wedge':
I think we designed ourselves a bit like a thermal wedge, if you will. We designed a system with the kind of GPUs we thought we needed at the time, and that we thought would serve well with a dual GPU architecture. It was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But workloads haven't materialized to match that as broadly as we'd hoped.
Schiller making sure Apple stays tied to the Mac:
We are committed to the Mac, we have great talents on the Mac, both hardware and software, we have great products planned for the future, and as far as our horizon can see, the Mac is an essential component things that Apple offers, including our business customers.
To say that Apple kept its promise is an understatement. Not only did Apple release the modular Mac Pro and the since discontinued iMac Pro, but it also finally ditched the problematic butterfly keyboard on MacBooks, announced its revolutionary transition to Apple Silicon, brought back a wide array of ports on the latest MacBook . The Pro models gave customers a whole new option in Mac Studio, and more.
Apple's roundtable with journalists will forever be a turning point in Mac history.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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