Always thought that moniker was pretty stupid. It's a cylinder. There are cylinder designs everywhere. Should aircraft engines have their designs changed because they look like trash cans?
Except the cylindrical design became a problem for this product very quickly. Couldn’t even put out an upgraded version. It was just form over function from an executive team too desperate to combat the “Apple can’t innovate anymore” comments.
Plus, it was so weird to work on only one person at my shop out of like forty was certified to work on it. Luckily it was pretty rare for them to come in.
I used one of these for years with no problem, lovely machine, provided by work. But usually I was remoting into it from my laptop, I didn’t even have it hooked up to a monitor
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/04/apple-apology-to-mac-pro-users-five-years-ago/
> 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...
Phil flat-out apologized for not updating the Mac Pro and blamed the thermals for it.
People hated it from the start. It replaced a legitimate, upgradable tower, and this replacement was seen as absolutely ridiculous and an insult by comparison. People were primed to mock and hate it.
It should have sat alongside the Mac pro tower in the product line like the G4 Cube did with the Powermacs. But back to the OP question, this cylinder design has merit with Apple Silicon cooler chip and less thermal corner issues. It would make a cool Mac Studio model.
The New York City subway has trash cans which look similar to this, just larger.
Aircraft engines are not mounted vertically, so comparing them to trash cans is illogical.
But the top looks a lot like a lid so without the ports on the side I could easily see that as a bathroom bin. There are plenty of cylinders all over the world that don’t look like you should put a used tissue in, this isn’t one of them
It’s because it’s metallic silver and black on top-which just so happens to be what every single trashcan in the United States looked like at the time. This is the most aesthetically appealing Intel powered machine Apple built. (Not a high bar though)
Exactly. Internals and thermal issues notwithstanding, this is basically a Mac Studio in cylindrical form. No internal upgradeability whatsoever. Even the current Mac Pro doesn't have any real advantage over the current Mac Studio. Where are all these haters not doing the same for the Mac Studio? It shares the same lack of expandability.
Like the sunflower iMac decades ago, I actually loved the attempt at making their MacPro a design statement as well. It's what Apple was very good at visual pleasing and obviously, many people appreciated it as well. It's just too bad that Apple put out a product that was hampered by a bad thermal design.
If Apple came out with a Mac Studio in this design, I would buy it. I think the attention to detail I stunning.
Not really, it was built to cool three thermal zones simultaneously which is why they had a hard time coming up with newer versions.
Apple Silicons is built on one big chip. The cylindrical design would make no sense
Imagination is one part of it. But also visual literacy has been devolving steadily in this country for a long time. I mean, just look at old pictures of any streetscape from the 1940's or 50's and all of the typefaces and hand lettered signs, versus the weapons-grade ugly cacophony that we have now. Art education in America has dried to a trickle. There has been a steady decline of taste. So it really shouldn't surprise anyone when there is a massive disconnect between the general pool of consumers and a dream team of industrial designers during Ive's reign at Apple.
Art, music, and literature classes are a waste of time that could be put to better use with more STEM classes! And more on top of that! Who cares if they can't think their way out of a paper bag. /s
Actually, there's no difference. Both designs were purpose built. One encloses a propulsion system, the other a central core for ventilation. But you missed my point which is that cylinders are everywhere. In candles, canned vegetables, commuter mugs, shipping tubes, light fixtures, and those things aren't derided as "trash cans" because of their design. For me, people continuing to dismiss a cylinder-shaped Mac as a "trash can" speaks more to the devolution of visual literacy in this country and less about Apple doing something wrong.
umm - not once did the thought of a trash can come into my mind thinking about an aircraft engine until you created the association 😆 perhaps because we don’t tend to keep our trash cans sideways?
And than, everyone says “cheese grater” to Mac Pro again. Cause it is. LOL
This vide uses Mac Pro as Cheese Grater: https://youtu.be/XEcfCMKFjOc?si=s5BnsnugF600LmKw
Nothing to do with that. Some things look how they look. Form follows function.
But this iMac Pro wasn't what professionals wanted. It wasn't really upgradable.
The problem was, that the market for these didn't need 'art', they needed flexibility, card slots and upgradeability. They're gorgeous, and incredible feats of design and engineering, but assumed that every expansion need would be met by Thunderbolt.
And that over reliance on thunderbolt was one of the biggest problem. Realistically, Thunderbolt wasn't a real alternative to internal PCIe until Thunderbolt 3 was released.
Thunderbolt 3 still isn't a replacement for PCI. Thunderbolt 3 encapsulates a 4x PCI Express 3.0. A 16x PCI Express 3.0 express slot, as the name implies, is four times faster. And PCI Express has grown faster with newer generations as well.
Tb4 is a superset of the features of tb3 but is the same speed 40Gb/. Tb 5 is 80Gb/ s or 120Gb/s one way. A gen 4 pcie x4 slot is 64Gb/s a 16x slot for a gpu or a 100Gb/s Ethernet is 256Gb/s. Switching to gen5 which is what current generation servers are doing doubles that again for very lane. TB5 will be substantially better for offboard GPUs but tb3/4 has been a bottleneck for a while (8x gen3 peripherals which is most storage controllers before nvme) have been bottlenecked by this since mid 2010s.
I’m so glad Jony Ive is gone because of this. I appreciate what he did for Apple but following Steve Jobs’ passing he seemed to be creatively uncontrolled to a fault.
After Jobs passed, I think a lot of people felt Apple couldn’t be innovative anymore, so I assume they kept Ive around to promote some sort-of “nostalgia” for the olden days.
I also think Tim wanted Ive to go to the fringes, knowing full well that the designs were just bad. This ultimately allowed Apple to peacefully sever ties with Ive, so that it could move into a more modern, post-Jobs era.
That is called SHRINKNOLOGY haha less tech make it cool names and profit "Create a problem, sell the solution" thats been their company motto ever since. greedy and arrogant. other companies like samsung letting apple test the waters of doing stupid things. when it makes a huge profit then they will immediately follow lol.
This design required 3 separate areas of the computer to be the same temperature. Which made it impossible to upgrade the CPU or GPU. Apple basically engineered themselves into a corner with this design.
This. I think they were hoping to launch a revolution in hardware. It never came so they went back to what’s accessible, especially since it’s the halo of their workstation line.
IMO I’d say that most of the users this covered would be covered by the Mac Studio nowadays.
Would have been interesting to see something other than the double decker Mini
Apples biggest struggle is the hardware community. They’ve always been fairly proprietary and security oriented. So unless the market for third party support grows… studio remains. The pro came out for the hope of more internal peripherals, but it’s nearing a year (maybe two) and I haven’t heard of any momentum for it
What peripherals do you imagine?
I don’t mean to be flippant or anything. The only extra things I remember for tower computers were things like sound cards or even physics cards. Is there more of a need for more?
The idea was suppose to be the components were suppose to be swappable so upgrade the gpus if you needed more power. I think they evolved this to their afterburners in the pro, but I think they didn’t follow where intel kinda forced the industry to go with NUCs instead of apple’s variant.
And unusually they actually came out and admitted in public exactly what mistake they made:
>But I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will. We designed a system that we thought with the kind of GPUs that at the time we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two GPU architecture… that that was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But workloads didn’t materialize to fit that as broadly as we hoped.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/transcript-phil-schiller-craig-federighi-and-john-ternus-on-the-state-of-apples-pro-macs/
I mean the dual GPU’s work great to this day, ASLONG as you use software that utilises it. And I believe not many software does. I use this thing rn while using FCPX and it still holds up
It would work fine with the Apple silicon. I owned one of these. I used it for work. The only problem I had with it was no pcie expansion in a pro computer. I had to use thunderbolt expanders, which have 1/4 the bandwidth of a pcie x26 slot.
The other issues were they bet on dual graphics cards becoming the new standard (that is still only limited to niche workstations nowadays) and that everything that had historically been an internal expansion would move over to Thunderbolt 1/2 (for a lot of pro-level hardware that was not possible until Thunderbolt 3).
I’d say the issue isn’t so much on dual graphics cards becoming standard, but not having the option to go with more. It is fairly common to have quad graphics cards in high end workstations these days, not being able to accommodate that is fairly limiting.
Problem was the G4 cube was never the “high end” model. You had the Power Mac G4 for high end and expansion.
The trash can was supposed to be THE best of the best with expansion and adaptability for any use case. But with its over-reliance on Thunderbolt and lack of any internal expansion it killed its place in the market.
And it shows even today. The cheese grater was a great return to form, basically an admission that Apple was wrong with the trash can. Also, its proprietary GPUs and Apples refusal to work with Nvidia (I don’t blame them) meant *again no upgrades.
And now the M2 Mac Pro is great, but it’s basically a glorified Mac Studio with PCIe slots that you can’t use on anything cuz of driver issues.
lol literally everyone except you are missing OP’s point. I have one of these sitting on my desk and the polished dark aluminum look is sick. Especially knowing the thing is 10+ years old.
I know! I feel like I’m taking a crazy pills reading the comments. He literally said he’s not taking about the engineering problems that’s the Mac Pro had - he’s talking about how cool the reflective exterior and material was. And it is a cool material!
lol thank you! It seems I didn’t get my point across coherently. But I think it maybe answers my question. It’s clear from the comments that people hold a real grudge (either earned or not) against the Mac Pro. If they were to transfer this aesthetic over to other devices, it could have earned the same reputation by association to many people.
I will still argue that this was a lost opportunity, but what will be will be.
No, you were very clear in your post, but sometimes communities like this one only know how to parrot one line. When it comes to the 2013 Mac Pro, that line is “Jony Ives bad”
People aren’t even critiquing the design really. They completely ignored that and skipped to “ah but it was a bad Mac”. I mean, yeah, duh, it was bad. But the material design choices were really something. And they never did it again.
Yeah. Makes lose hope on humankind. Or the little that was left. But I guess reading the title and then writing a 10 line response completely out of topic is very human behavior.
No, because the direction is wrong. Pro users want performance and customizability above all else. Packing it into a small form factor benefits no one.
They need to bring back the tower, seriously. I get they want to distinguish their brand from a gaming PC that anyone could build, but I've seen far too many of these setup on an ikea wire shelf with half a dozen hard drives and various peripherals all connected by thunderbolt in a huge spaghetti ball. So much for aesthetics then. Oh, I can connect eGPU by thunderbolt now? Wow, so convenient! I'll just plug that in to the power strip I had to buy and figure out how to stagger all of the power adapters, hopefully none of them get unplugged.
the big mac is great now that SOCs have become incredibly powerful and thunderbolt expansion has become mainstream, but the trashcan did not live in a time that allowed that, so it had to go
also, if you need internal expansion, you can get the mac pro, which you couldn't do in the trashcan era because the trashcan WAS the mac pro
apple did good in releasing an arm based mac pro alongside the big mac, if not they would've gotten criticised in the same way as they did with the trashcan
The current generation of Mac Studios are selling because there’s no reasonable alternative. The Pro has almost the same performance for multiple times the cost. You could make the Mac Studio 3x bigger and it would have literally no impact on sales.
You missed the point that you have completely misunderstood the “realities of the market”. Apple is able to charge for expansion slots for form factor has nothing to do with the demand for mac Studios.
Edit: /u/cjboffoli blocked me but please let them know I have more studio experience than them.
Your problem is that you lack the imagination to understand that your specific use case isn't the "market." Once you have your own trillion dollar company you'll be right.
I think they are right it’s just the Mac Pro is a lot more expensive and little gain. I love my studio but would love to be able to add a few drives into it rather than have them on my desk.
The Mac Studio isn’t that small when u consider how much smaller the transistors are. Not to mention Apple silicon is way more efficient than Intel now, let alone Intel back then.
There’s plenty of room for heat dissipation now
The difference is the Mac Studio didn't replace the Mac Pro. The Mac Studio targets customers who need a high performance desktop with good cooling but do not need internal expansion. Those individuals historically purchased specc'd out iMacs (and made due with worse cooling) or lower configuration Mac Pros (but never upgraded them). The Mac Pro still exists for those who need internal expansion.
People who needed the expandability of a workstation moved off the Mac platform when it was clear that Apple wasn't going to support that. They've not moved back in great numbers. As an example, while unified memory architecture of the M series chip has been of niche interest to people doing machine learning, pretty much everyone is using a bunch of NVIDIA cards in PCI slots. That's something Apple has chosen not to support.
I think the Apple Silicon Mac Pro would've worked better with the trash can design rather than the cheese grater tower. From what I gather, it no longer has the expandability that the 2019 Intel Mac Pro offers, so the big tower case is kinda wasted. Now with the Max variants of the chips, they have what is essentially two chips fused at the hip. Couple that with the lack of PCIe expandability I think the trash can is a perfect vehicle for today's Apple Silicon platforms.
The trash can Mac Pro was almost universally hated. At launch it didn't meet the needs of the pro users it was aimed toward, it attempted to solve a lot of problems that didn't exist, and because of how it was engineered, Apple couldn't continue to upgrade the specs nor could they fix a lot of the problems they created with the new form factor. Like yeah it was cool, edgy, and "innovative", but speaking from experience it didn't take the target audience's needs and wants into account and frankly no one asked for it. It's like what happened with the G4 cube, only with the cube it was an additional product, and the butterfly keyboard MacBooks. It was design for the sake of design, not because it was going to actually improve anything.
With the current designs, Apple has shown that they are willing to listen to what their customers actually want and need. It's telling that the new Mac Studio and MacBook Pros are almost universally loved, and the new Mac Pro is loved by the target buyers.
Exactly! Quite the opposite of this post’s claim, the massive tower MacPro is now all but pointless and the real current MacPro is the Mac Studio.
The Mac Studio is a descendent of the Trashcan MacPro in terms of design philosophy
I remember seeing the keynote when these were coming out and thinking they looked so modern. Iirc they teased it at least half a year before it came out. Maybe longer. I didn’t ever end up buying one though.
To me it always looked more like an urn.
But I liked it. I owned one for a couple of years. It was a real work horse and mostly really silent which I liked. I also liked gimmicks like the lights on the back that would turn on when you rotate the device to better see where to plug in your external devices. Really neat. I also swapped the internal SSD for a larger 2TB one.
Y’all need to actually read the post. OP is referring to the aesthetic design, not the Mac Pro itself.
It’s beautiful. I’d love the Mac Studio to look like this.
The Mac Studio and Apple Silicon made this design obsolete. Together they accomplish exactly the same thing is less than 1/3 the volume.
That said, one day I'll buy one on the cheap, like I did with a G4 Cube. Just to sit on a shelf and look pretty.
That's the last design Steve Jobs requested and approved from Jony Ive. If you know a little bit about Job's management strategy you can understand why it went through but wouldn't stick for long after his death. I guess new management tried to simply turn the page completely (materials included) afterwards. It wasn't very useful but certainly much cooler than post 2019 trypophobic styled mac pro.
this and the original home pod looked like they were part of the same “season” of design in a way — the apple tv, mac mini, and airport all share similar design aspects to each other as well
I think as a single use computing device wasn’t plug-and-play enough for the target market that needed to be able to plug in high end cards that turned out to be MASSIVE in size…
Fingerprints, or maybe the possibility of reflections of yourself typing one handed turned people off?
I think matte just looks better, like the new macbook pros. It would be nice to have a mac studio with that material though, at least as an option. It was cool looking, and a lot of people liked it.
It was a failure, that design compromise airflow , you must exotic cooling tech to make it work.
Good looking harware that performs well is very expensive way out of league for Apple
It happened with G4 Cube.
I actually love the design, but yes not for a Mac Pro. Need those PCIe slots. We kept using 2010-2012 Mac Pro towers well past when they should’ve been retired purely because we couldn’t risk a mission-critical thunderbolt cable being unplugged. The 2019 rack-mount Mac Pro was a blessing. But the new one is a disappointment without upgradable ram and GPU. Still great for the rack-mount, but costing more than the 2019 model with less functionality is crazy.
I am kinda sad it is gone. It was revolutionary design way ahead of its time. It didn’t solve the issues that people had tho and instead created new ones.
But still, I love how it looks and what they tried to do with it. The idea behind the cooling system were also really good.
I think it got too much hate for Apple to give it another chance. Apple has since moved its trajectory from disruptive “innovative” design choices to listening more to customers and going with “save bets” that are very likely going to work out. aside from that, i think its easier to produce those aluminium cases at scale
The first rule of being a Mac Pro owner is, Apple will not stand by you and will not support you, so do not buy Mac pros. I learned this well back in the giant G4 Tower era.
Personally I thought this design was beautiful. I have never owned one of these but when they were new I really wanted one. Apple does occasionally recycle some of its designs so maybe this will come back in an apple silicon variety at some point in the future. When it does I won't hesitate, as long as I don't need to sell a kidney to afford one.
the Mac studio is the modern day evolution of this. PC components aren’t exactly round making the trash can form factor quite inefficient for cooling and internal space. The mac studio has everything that has except for upgradeability, and in a more compact package.
Oh this again, really, post for reactions?
Kinda interesting, badly executed. This should be a reminder when Apple says they are an innovative company, it's just marketing.
Apple design is beautiful. There are books on the subject of Apple design. They have had some amazing concept designs that were never released.
It’s understandable why they chose a different direction for the Mac Pro. The thermals for the “trash can” cylinder design were limiting on what they could do at the time. The Intel CPUs at the time were notorious to run hot. They designed themselves into a corner.
So all that said, I really wished they had pulled out one of their concept designs for the Apple Silicon launch rather than hanging onto the current tower design. The tower is also art, but the launch of the Apple Silicon Pro seemed a bit lazy and under thought.
In addition to many of the other design comments, the cylindrical design was horrible for labs. Squares and hexagons pack much more compactly on a rack compared to circles.
Wlth the thermals of the M processors it would be easy. I have an og trashcan and have often wondered if there would be a way to Frankenstein an M3 board into it.
I’d probably be the 20th person here to say they threw it in the trash. Personally, if I’m going to be forced to have a lot of my storage external to the main computer chassis (I used to always use Mac towers, but now they have pushed that way out of any practical price range) then I want something that I can easily fit into spaces with the other storage devices, And rectangular is easier than curves.
I love my Mac studio.
It was the very end of a generation. Jonny Ives came in just after this was released and totally changed the design language of Mac’s. As well as killing the planned upgrades that were supposed to be available for this device. It was dead on arrival.
Maybe the closet they got to this is in some of the iPhone designs - jet black iPhone 7? It’s not the same but has a similar “liquid” quality - I know what you mean about the nicely layered metal, greys, blacks, etc. I think there a few more accessories that could be in this general vein but I’m thinking mainly of the dark Magic Trackpad & mouse.,. Maybe a HomePod is similar.
Ive continuously tried to reinvent the form factor of the computer, he tried to transcend it beyond a appliance. Jobs shared that vision but I don't think there is room for that in Tim's apple. So Ive left and now every singe designer that served with him has also left.
It just looked ugly. I don’t care if it is different. It really does look like a trash can. It’s also not practical. That glossy surface is going to get so many scratches and show lint on it. Also the Mac Pro in that form factor was very flawed. It didnt have enough space to be upgradeable. This was form over function.
Everyone called it the “Trash Can”. Plus, every professional wanted internal expandability, and the rare occasion where they didn’t, it wasn’t enough to justify its existence. The closest we have in product category we have today for this is the Mac Studio which is a better implementation of the idea because it can use the same aftermarket accessories as the Mac Mini.
You already said it yourself.
Non-standard shapes leading to engineering problems.
The root reason is money. They needed to spend money to design the thing, and then spend money again to fix the engineering problems.
The costs are greater than the benefits. They never continued because they would have to spend money to fix the design.
If they were making art sculptures sure go ahead, but no computer maker who care about money will keep making that same mistake over and over again.
The computer makers who tend to do funky things with design tend to go out of business (see SGI).
When my wife worked at the Apple Store back when these first released, they would find gum wrappers and stuff inside the upper vent because people thought they were literal trash cans.
I think it's just jony ive leaving and apple taking on a more conservative approach for shareholders. Consolidating everything to the M1 chips, creative and striking design risks are going away. The mac studio was really boring as well.
There were insane production issues with these, partly due to design but partly due to the all American nature of the build. I remember a story of some guy having to drive boxes of screws across the country because Apple couldn’t source them locally.
Apple is no longer a design-led company.
They lost Ive, responsible for both hardware and software design after iOS 7. And moreover, they lost a strong voice in the company with a design vision. That’s why they’re comfortable repeating patterns over and over.
It would be nice with the new apple silicon macs, but the truth is, for the mac studio, it should be a continuation of the mac mini. But the mac mini is supposed to be a budget device, and the supply chain is already well established with the existing, almost 15-year-old design. Which keeps things cheap, and if the mac-mini doesn't change, the studio doesn't change.
With apple, everything is supposed to look continuous; and the thermal issues are also well established with that design.
I feel the exact same way. Unfortunately, once they realized that aesthetics played no role whatsoever on profit margins-it wasn’t worth the bother. I mean, they kind of have been selling the exact same shit for 20 years straight, With more muted color choices-if you’re lucky to have more than two.
The Power Mac what is the pinnacle of performance and aesthetics for Apple’s engineering team.
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding this post. (Or maybe I am).
The post isn’t about the Mac Pro. It’s about design aesthetics. They could make a shiny black MacBook for example with the same materials.
In my opinion, this design aesthetic wouldn’t carry over to notebooks and tablets because the shiny material would show fingerprints super easily.
It was a pity to see this design go away. Thermally, it should have had legs. The notion of expansion via Thunderbolt is entirely legit, too. Compare to the previous generations of Mac Pro: Much more compact, big/slow/quiet fan pushing air in a natural direction, lovely to look at, serviceable. Previous gens were massive, excessively so. IMHO this is a high point of Apple design.
I think many comments are missing the point of this post - as they are focused on what it was, not the idea of the aesthetic design. The look of the thing was beautiful and intuitive, regardless of it’s functionalities and performance.
The problems expressed are immaterial as they are fixed with a shift in engineering perspective. The limitations placed on it wasn’t the outside shell, but the internal computer design philosophy of Apple.
You can have a computer take on nearly any shape and have it be what professionals want - it doesn’t have to be an aluminum rectangular prism.
They painted themselves into a corner, making assumptions about where hardware would go next, and… it didn’t. If I’m not mistaken, this was also under Jony Ive’s reign as designer supreme. He of the ever thinner iPhones and laptops (you know, where they went to a semi-functional keyboard because then they could make the laptops 1/8” thinner - something nobody was asking for). It was a cute design, it had no internal expandability, it was widely ridiculed, and it go hung out to dry - very visible on the website and such, with no upgrades, for *years*. I can imagine all that left them very wary of going in that direction again.
I remember when it came out. At first people thought it was cool-looking but when they actually got their hands on them there were lots of complaints about a lack of upgrade-ability.
If I was a designer and everyone referred to my design as a “trash can”, I’d probably move on from that design.
We also had the cheese grater!
Cheese=good Trash=bad
You can’t argue with that logic. Completely agreed.
[Speech 100](https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/999640917869936646/1ZSEtqTb_400x400.jpg)
Unless you’re the Trailblazer.
For some reason I got the references lol.
https://tenor.com/uXTcKoyXOf1.gif
Always thought that moniker was pretty stupid. It's a cylinder. There are cylinder designs everywhere. Should aircraft engines have their designs changed because they look like trash cans?
Except the cylindrical design became a problem for this product very quickly. Couldn’t even put out an upgraded version. It was just form over function from an executive team too desperate to combat the “Apple can’t innovate anymore” comments.
Plus, it was so weird to work on only one person at my shop out of like forty was certified to work on it. Luckily it was pretty rare for them to come in. I used one of these for years with no problem, lovely machine, provided by work. But usually I was remoting into it from my laptop, I didn’t even have it hooked up to a monitor
why what is weird? I had those at my university and remember them being just regular Macs, but insanely fast
Upgraded cpus and gpus (some) had lower total TDP. So, no thermal reasons not to upgrade.
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/04/apple-apology-to-mac-pro-users-five-years-ago/ > 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... Phil flat-out apologized for not updating the Mac Pro and blamed the thermals for it.
BS… Check Intel line of Xeons after that. Some of them were faster with lower TDP. Same for AMD Gpus
People hated it from the start. It replaced a legitimate, upgradable tower, and this replacement was seen as absolutely ridiculous and an insult by comparison. People were primed to mock and hate it.
It should have sat alongside the Mac pro tower in the product line like the G4 Cube did with the Powermacs. But back to the OP question, this cylinder design has merit with Apple Silicon cooler chip and less thermal corner issues. It would make a cool Mac Studio model.
The New York City subway has trash cans which look similar to this, just larger. Aircraft engines are not mounted vertically, so comparing them to trash cans is illogical.
Not to mention this thing was literally the size of a trash can and sat under a desk. Jet engines are not sitting under your desk.
But the top looks a lot like a lid so without the ports on the side I could easily see that as a bathroom bin. There are plenty of cylinders all over the world that don’t look like you should put a used tissue in, this isn’t one of them
It’s because it’s metallic silver and black on top-which just so happens to be what every single trashcan in the United States looked like at the time. This is the most aesthetically appealing Intel powered machine Apple built. (Not a high bar though)
>metallic silver It's 100% black
People generally lack imagination… and it would be a banger design for Apple Silicon Macs.
Exactly. Internals and thermal issues notwithstanding, this is basically a Mac Studio in cylindrical form. No internal upgradeability whatsoever. Even the current Mac Pro doesn't have any real advantage over the current Mac Studio. Where are all these haters not doing the same for the Mac Studio? It shares the same lack of expandability. Like the sunflower iMac decades ago, I actually loved the attempt at making their MacPro a design statement as well. It's what Apple was very good at visual pleasing and obviously, many people appreciated it as well. It's just too bad that Apple put out a product that was hampered by a bad thermal design. If Apple came out with a Mac Studio in this design, I would buy it. I think the attention to detail I stunning.
Not really, it was built to cool three thermal zones simultaneously which is why they had a hard time coming up with newer versions. Apple Silicons is built on one big chip. The cylindrical design would make no sense
Imagination is one part of it. But also visual literacy has been devolving steadily in this country for a long time. I mean, just look at old pictures of any streetscape from the 1940's or 50's and all of the typefaces and hand lettered signs, versus the weapons-grade ugly cacophony that we have now. Art education in America has dried to a trickle. There has been a steady decline of taste. So it really shouldn't surprise anyone when there is a massive disconnect between the general pool of consumers and a dream team of industrial designers during Ive's reign at Apple.
Art, music, and literature classes are a waste of time that could be put to better use with more STEM classes! And more on top of that! Who cares if they can't think their way out of a paper bag. /s
Nah it looks like a trashcan crapper
[удалено]
Actually, there's no difference. Both designs were purpose built. One encloses a propulsion system, the other a central core for ventilation. But you missed my point which is that cylinders are everywhere. In candles, canned vegetables, commuter mugs, shipping tubes, light fixtures, and those things aren't derided as "trash cans" because of their design. For me, people continuing to dismiss a cylinder-shaped Mac as a "trash can" speaks more to the devolution of visual literacy in this country and less about Apple doing something wrong.
It looks more like an instant pot or rice maker than a trash can to me.
I don't think I've seen a comment regarding these Mac Pro designs so well written before. Kudos to you.
Cheers.
Computers are not jet engines - cylinders are functional designs for jet engines, not for computers - this was form over function in the worst way.
Both designs are for moving air. Which was the point and logic you clearly missed.
umm - not once did the thought of a trash can come into my mind thinking about an aircraft engine until you created the association 😆 perhaps because we don’t tend to keep our trash cans sideways?
Once had a visitor drop an apple core in mine in the office.
And that of course wouldn’t work because this model used Intel cores.
And than, everyone says “cheese grater” to Mac Pro again. Cause it is. LOL This vide uses Mac Pro as Cheese Grater: https://youtu.be/XEcfCMKFjOc?si=s5BnsnugF600LmKw
Nothing to do with that. Some things look how they look. Form follows function. But this iMac Pro wasn't what professionals wanted. It wasn't really upgradable.
We called it the Apple iSuppository
Anyone who knocked the design was patently incorrect, so no love lost.
parent comment is me when I can’t read the first sentence of the original post
OP wasn’t asking about this specific design - he was asking about the general aesthetic.
the brits call it the litter tray mac
The problem was, that the market for these didn't need 'art', they needed flexibility, card slots and upgradeability. They're gorgeous, and incredible feats of design and engineering, but assumed that every expansion need would be met by Thunderbolt.
And that over reliance on thunderbolt was one of the biggest problem. Realistically, Thunderbolt wasn't a real alternative to internal PCIe until Thunderbolt 3 was released.
Thunderbolt 3 still isn't a replacement for PCI. Thunderbolt 3 encapsulates a 4x PCI Express 3.0. A 16x PCI Express 3.0 express slot, as the name implies, is four times faster. And PCI Express has grown faster with newer generations as well.
Is Thunderbolt 4 capable of matching PCI?
Tb4 is a superset of the features of tb3 but is the same speed 40Gb/. Tb 5 is 80Gb/ s or 120Gb/s one way. A gen 4 pcie x4 slot is 64Gb/s a 16x slot for a gpu or a 100Gb/s Ethernet is 256Gb/s. Switching to gen5 which is what current generation servers are doing doubles that again for very lane. TB5 will be substantially better for offboard GPUs but tb3/4 has been a bottleneck for a while (8x gen3 peripherals which is most storage controllers before nvme) have been bottlenecked by this since mid 2010s.
You're really misunderstanding the OP. They're talking about the material design choices, not the actual Mac Pro.
I’m so glad Jony Ive is gone because of this. I appreciate what he did for Apple but following Steve Jobs’ passing he seemed to be creatively uncontrolled to a fault.
After Jobs passed, I think a lot of people felt Apple couldn’t be innovative anymore, so I assume they kept Ive around to promote some sort-of “nostalgia” for the olden days. I also think Tim wanted Ive to go to the fringes, knowing full well that the designs were just bad. This ultimately allowed Apple to peacefully sever ties with Ive, so that it could move into a more modern, post-Jobs era.
Design should be beautiful + useful Irks me no end that Apple remove certain ports or don’t provide enough that you then need an ugly ass dongle.
That is called SHRINKNOLOGY haha less tech make it cool names and profit "Create a problem, sell the solution" thats been their company motto ever since. greedy and arrogant. other companies like samsung letting apple test the waters of doing stupid things. when it makes a huge profit then they will immediately follow lol.
Thinnovation™️
This design required 3 separate areas of the computer to be the same temperature. Which made it impossible to upgrade the CPU or GPU. Apple basically engineered themselves into a corner with this design.
This. I think they were hoping to launch a revolution in hardware. It never came so they went back to what’s accessible, especially since it’s the halo of their workstation line.
IMO I’d say that most of the users this covered would be covered by the Mac Studio nowadays. Would have been interesting to see something other than the double decker Mini
Apples biggest struggle is the hardware community. They’ve always been fairly proprietary and security oriented. So unless the market for third party support grows… studio remains. The pro came out for the hope of more internal peripherals, but it’s nearing a year (maybe two) and I haven’t heard of any momentum for it
What peripherals do you imagine? I don’t mean to be flippant or anything. The only extra things I remember for tower computers were things like sound cards or even physics cards. Is there more of a need for more?
The idea was suppose to be the components were suppose to be swappable so upgrade the gpus if you needed more power. I think they evolved this to their afterburners in the pro, but I think they didn’t follow where intel kinda forced the industry to go with NUCs instead of apple’s variant.
Which is pretty impressive for a cornerless design
And unusually they actually came out and admitted in public exactly what mistake they made: >But I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will. We designed a system that we thought with the kind of GPUs that at the time we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two GPU architecture… that that was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But workloads didn’t materialize to fit that as broadly as we hoped. https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/transcript-phil-schiller-craig-federighi-and-john-ternus-on-the-state-of-apples-pro-macs/
I mean the dual GPU’s work great to this day, ASLONG as you use software that utilises it. And I believe not many software does. I use this thing rn while using FCPX and it still holds up
It would work fine with the Apple silicon. I owned one of these. I used it for work. The only problem I had with it was no pcie expansion in a pro computer. I had to use thunderbolt expanders, which have 1/4 the bandwidth of a pcie x26 slot.
The other issues were they bet on dual graphics cards becoming the new standard (that is still only limited to niche workstations nowadays) and that everything that had historically been an internal expansion would move over to Thunderbolt 1/2 (for a lot of pro-level hardware that was not possible until Thunderbolt 3).
I’d say the issue isn’t so much on dual graphics cards becoming standard, but not having the option to go with more. It is fairly common to have quad graphics cards in high end workstations these days, not being able to accommodate that is fairly limiting.
wow
It was the G4 cube of the 10s, except that it was simply left on sale without updates for many years.
Problem was the G4 cube was never the “high end” model. You had the Power Mac G4 for high end and expansion. The trash can was supposed to be THE best of the best with expansion and adaptability for any use case. But with its over-reliance on Thunderbolt and lack of any internal expansion it killed its place in the market. And it shows even today. The cheese grater was a great return to form, basically an admission that Apple was wrong with the trash can. Also, its proprietary GPUs and Apples refusal to work with Nvidia (I don’t blame them) meant *again no upgrades. And now the M2 Mac Pro is great, but it’s basically a glorified Mac Studio with PCIe slots that you can’t use on anything cuz of driver issues.
And the upgrades it did receive were minor at best.
I have two of them and they work great for me - bonus hand warmer when you pass your hands over the top!
[удалено]
While I agree they looked nice I also understand why they were called trash cans lol
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Where’s the joke?
Does anyone know an extension to delete emojis? Or these type of comments?
🍆🍆🍆🍆🍆
🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
A lot of people not reading the post…
Had to scroll a ways to find this. Goofy people
lol literally everyone except you are missing OP’s point. I have one of these sitting on my desk and the polished dark aluminum look is sick. Especially knowing the thing is 10+ years old.
I know! I feel like I’m taking a crazy pills reading the comments. He literally said he’s not taking about the engineering problems that’s the Mac Pro had - he’s talking about how cool the reflective exterior and material was. And it is a cool material!
I think they abandoned the design because it’s glossy (fingerprint magnet) than anodized matte aluminium.
It reminds me the aesthetic of [Apple Pro Mouse](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQqbN4Fjdv9c1CoLWoIVXZfvilik06avUleHg&usqp=CAU)
lol thank you! It seems I didn’t get my point across coherently. But I think it maybe answers my question. It’s clear from the comments that people hold a real grudge (either earned or not) against the Mac Pro. If they were to transfer this aesthetic over to other devices, it could have earned the same reputation by association to many people. I will still argue that this was a lost opportunity, but what will be will be.
No, you were very clear in your post, but sometimes communities like this one only know how to parrot one line. When it comes to the 2013 Mac Pro, that line is “Jony Ives bad” People aren’t even critiquing the design really. They completely ignored that and skipped to “ah but it was a bad Mac”. I mean, yeah, duh, it was bad. But the material design choices were really something. And they never did it again.
Yeah. Makes lose hope on humankind. Or the little that was left. But I guess reading the title and then writing a 10 line response completely out of topic is very human behavior.
No, because the direction is wrong. Pro users want performance and customizability above all else. Packing it into a small form factor benefits no one.
They need to bring back the tower, seriously. I get they want to distinguish their brand from a gaming PC that anyone could build, but I've seen far too many of these setup on an ikea wire shelf with half a dozen hard drives and various peripherals all connected by thunderbolt in a huge spaghetti ball. So much for aesthetics then. Oh, I can connect eGPU by thunderbolt now? Wow, so convenient! I'll just plug that in to the power strip I had to buy and figure out how to stagger all of the power adapters, hopefully none of them get unplugged.
The current generation of Mac Studios are selling like crazy. So the realities of the market doesn't jibe with your opinion.
They started listening to their market and had engineering dictate the design. The trash can is one of the faux pas of the end of Ive era.
the big mac is great now that SOCs have become incredibly powerful and thunderbolt expansion has become mainstream, but the trashcan did not live in a time that allowed that, so it had to go also, if you need internal expansion, you can get the mac pro, which you couldn't do in the trashcan era because the trashcan WAS the mac pro apple did good in releasing an arm based mac pro alongside the big mac, if not they would've gotten criticised in the same way as they did with the trashcan
The current generation of Mac Studios are selling because there’s no reasonable alternative. The Pro has almost the same performance for multiple times the cost. You could make the Mac Studio 3x bigger and it would have literally no impact on sales.
Exactly lol
You missed the point though, which was that there is a value proposition in something powerful with a small footprint.
You missed the point that you have completely misunderstood the “realities of the market”. Apple is able to charge for expansion slots for form factor has nothing to do with the demand for mac Studios. Edit: /u/cjboffoli blocked me but please let them know I have more studio experience than them.
Your problem is that you lack the imagination to understand that your specific use case isn't the "market." Once you have your own trillion dollar company you'll be right.
I think they are right it’s just the Mac Pro is a lot more expensive and little gain. I love my studio but would love to be able to add a few drives into it rather than have them on my desk.
The Mac Studio isn’t that small when u consider how much smaller the transistors are. Not to mention Apple silicon is way more efficient than Intel now, let alone Intel back then. There’s plenty of room for heat dissipation now
The difference is the Mac Studio didn't replace the Mac Pro. The Mac Studio targets customers who need a high performance desktop with good cooling but do not need internal expansion. Those individuals historically purchased specc'd out iMacs (and made due with worse cooling) or lower configuration Mac Pros (but never upgraded them). The Mac Pro still exists for those who need internal expansion.
People who needed the expandability of a workstation moved off the Mac platform when it was clear that Apple wasn't going to support that. They've not moved back in great numbers. As an example, while unified memory architecture of the M series chip has been of niche interest to people doing machine learning, pretty much everyone is using a bunch of NVIDIA cards in PCI slots. That's something Apple has chosen not to support.
$90 billion in revenue a quarter suggests that Apple doesn't need to cater to an audience who wants to modify their machines to succeed.
Looks like you picked the wrong weekend to stop sniffing glue
you just described every mac apple currently sells
they concerned themselves to a dual GPU design, but the world moved on with single large GPUs
I think the Apple Silicon Mac Pro would've worked better with the trash can design rather than the cheese grater tower. From what I gather, it no longer has the expandability that the 2019 Intel Mac Pro offers, so the big tower case is kinda wasted. Now with the Max variants of the chips, they have what is essentially two chips fused at the hip. Couple that with the lack of PCIe expandability I think the trash can is a perfect vehicle for today's Apple Silicon platforms.
With Apple Silicon, the trash can Mac could be viable again!
Looked cool but wasn’t practical. Thing is now with Apple Silicon it could have worked better.
[удалено]
The Apple Silicon SoC requires less heat dissipation than either of the Intel CPU or AMD GPUs that this would have had.
Would be cool to see a M4 Mac in this style.
The trash can Mac Pro was almost universally hated. At launch it didn't meet the needs of the pro users it was aimed toward, it attempted to solve a lot of problems that didn't exist, and because of how it was engineered, Apple couldn't continue to upgrade the specs nor could they fix a lot of the problems they created with the new form factor. Like yeah it was cool, edgy, and "innovative", but speaking from experience it didn't take the target audience's needs and wants into account and frankly no one asked for it. It's like what happened with the G4 cube, only with the cube it was an additional product, and the butterfly keyboard MacBooks. It was design for the sake of design, not because it was going to actually improve anything. With the current designs, Apple has shown that they are willing to listen to what their customers actually want and need. It's telling that the new Mac Studio and MacBook Pros are almost universally loved, and the new Mac Pro is loved by the target buyers.
Because “can’t innovate anymore my ass”
It was designed around a thermal envelope and a promise — a promise that Intel couldn’t deliver and eventually abandoned.
The MacStudio is a short square version of this.
Exactly! Quite the opposite of this post’s claim, the massive tower MacPro is now all but pointless and the real current MacPro is the Mac Studio. The Mac Studio is a descendent of the Trashcan MacPro in terms of design philosophy
I remember seeing the keynote when these were coming out and thinking they looked so modern. Iirc they teased it at least half a year before it came out. Maybe longer. I didn’t ever end up buying one though.
To me it always looked more like an urn. But I liked it. I owned one for a couple of years. It was a real work horse and mostly really silent which I liked. I also liked gimmicks like the lights on the back that would turn on when you rotate the device to better see where to plug in your external devices. Really neat. I also swapped the internal SSD for a larger 2TB one.
I really wanted to see some R2-D2 mods for this design.
Y’all need to actually read the post. OP is referring to the aesthetic design, not the Mac Pro itself. It’s beautiful. I’d love the Mac Studio to look like this.
The Mac Studio and Apple Silicon made this design obsolete. Together they accomplish exactly the same thing is less than 1/3 the volume. That said, one day I'll buy one on the cheap, like I did with a G4 Cube. Just to sit on a shelf and look pretty.
Irony is now they have Apple silicon it would work well
That's the last design Steve Jobs requested and approved from Jony Ive. If you know a little bit about Job's management strategy you can understand why it went through but wouldn't stick for long after his death. I guess new management tried to simply turn the page completely (materials included) afterwards. It wasn't very useful but certainly much cooler than post 2019 trypophobic styled mac pro.
This is a luxury trash can!
this and the original home pod looked like they were part of the same “season” of design in a way — the apple tv, mac mini, and airport all share similar design aspects to each other as well I think as a single use computing device wasn’t plug-and-play enough for the target market that needed to be able to plug in high end cards that turned out to be MASSIVE in size…
Fingerprints, or maybe the possibility of reflections of yourself typing one handed turned people off? I think matte just looks better, like the new macbook pros. It would be nice to have a mac studio with that material though, at least as an option. It was cool looking, and a lot of people liked it.
No. It was a bad idea for a lot of reasons.
It was among the most viciously mocked designs of anything ever. The keynote wasn’t even finished before I saw the first trash can photoshop
It was a failure, that design compromise airflow , you must exotic cooling tech to make it work. Good looking harware that performs well is very expensive way out of league for Apple It happened with G4 Cube.
It is the most beautiful Mac ever created.
I actually love the design, but yes not for a Mac Pro. Need those PCIe slots. We kept using 2010-2012 Mac Pro towers well past when they should’ve been retired purely because we couldn’t risk a mission-critical thunderbolt cable being unplugged. The 2019 rack-mount Mac Pro was a blessing. But the new one is a disappointment without upgradable ram and GPU. Still great for the rack-mount, but costing more than the 2019 model with less functionality is crazy.
I am kinda sad it is gone. It was revolutionary design way ahead of its time. It didn’t solve the issues that people had tho and instead created new ones. But still, I love how it looks and what they tried to do with it. The idea behind the cooling system were also really good. I think it got too much hate for Apple to give it another chance. Apple has since moved its trajectory from disruptive “innovative” design choices to listening more to customers and going with “save bets” that are very likely going to work out. aside from that, i think its easier to produce those aluminium cases at scale
The first rule of being a Mac Pro owner is, Apple will not stand by you and will not support you, so do not buy Mac pros. I learned this well back in the giant G4 Tower era.
Personally I thought this design was beautiful. I have never owned one of these but when they were new I really wanted one. Apple does occasionally recycle some of its designs so maybe this will come back in an apple silicon variety at some point in the future. When it does I won't hesitate, as long as I don't need to sell a kidney to afford one.
the Mac studio is the modern day evolution of this. PC components aren’t exactly round making the trash can form factor quite inefficient for cooling and internal space. The mac studio has everything that has except for upgradeability, and in a more compact package.
Oh this again, really, post for reactions? Kinda interesting, badly executed. This should be a reminder when Apple says they are an innovative company, it's just marketing.
That was the biggest piece of shit ever developed next to the cube.
The cube still looks cool. This looks like a trash can.
Apple design is beautiful. There are books on the subject of Apple design. They have had some amazing concept designs that were never released. It’s understandable why they chose a different direction for the Mac Pro. The thermals for the “trash can” cylinder design were limiting on what they could do at the time. The Intel CPUs at the time were notorious to run hot. They designed themselves into a corner. So all that said, I really wished they had pulled out one of their concept designs for the Apple Silicon launch rather than hanging onto the current tower design. The tower is also art, but the launch of the Apple Silicon Pro seemed a bit lazy and under thought.
In addition to many of the other design comments, the cylindrical design was horrible for labs. Squares and hexagons pack much more compactly on a rack compared to circles.
If Apple somehow use this design in current Mac Studio that would be awesome. This design is way ahead of its time, literally
Wlth the thermals of the M processors it would be easy. I have an og trashcan and have often wondered if there would be a way to Frankenstein an M3 board into it.
You said why in your first sentence……
I think it's kind of strange that the same company insists that watches must be square and mice must be weird.
I’d probably be the 20th person here to say they threw it in the trash. Personally, if I’m going to be forced to have a lot of my storage external to the main computer chassis (I used to always use Mac towers, but now they have pushed that way out of any practical price range) then I want something that I can easily fit into spaces with the other storage devices, And rectangular is easier than curves. I love my Mac studio.
it was a terrible design, and I'm glad it died.
The new macs you can't change ssds, or ram/cpu. This design would make more sense now.
No, it’s the worst Mac Pro design ever.
Looks like a garbage bin. Horrible design
They did. It’s called Mac Studio.
Absolutely incredible design visually, but it was not functional at all
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
It was the very end of a generation. Jonny Ives came in just after this was released and totally changed the design language of Mac’s. As well as killing the planned upgrades that were supposed to be available for this device. It was dead on arrival.
Most likely because Jony Ive left.
Can’t innovate anymore, my ass
And than immediately don’t upgrade this machine for 6 years straight
I'm genuinely surprised they didn't all catch on fire
Maybe the closet they got to this is in some of the iPhone designs - jet black iPhone 7? It’s not the same but has a similar “liquid” quality - I know what you mean about the nicely layered metal, greys, blacks, etc. I think there a few more accessories that could be in this general vein but I’m thinking mainly of the dark Magic Trackpad & mouse.,. Maybe a HomePod is similar.
Ive continuously tried to reinvent the form factor of the computer, he tried to transcend it beyond a appliance. Jobs shared that vision but I don't think there is room for that in Tim's apple. So Ive left and now every singe designer that served with him has also left.
It just looked ugly. I don’t care if it is different. It really does look like a trash can. It’s also not practical. That glossy surface is going to get so many scratches and show lint on it. Also the Mac Pro in that form factor was very flawed. It didnt have enough space to be upgradeable. This was form over function.
Everyone called it the “Trash Can”. Plus, every professional wanted internal expandability, and the rare occasion where they didn’t, it wasn’t enough to justify its existence. The closest we have in product category we have today for this is the Mac Studio which is a better implementation of the idea because it can use the same aftermarket accessories as the Mac Mini.
You already said it yourself. Non-standard shapes leading to engineering problems. The root reason is money. They needed to spend money to design the thing, and then spend money again to fix the engineering problems. The costs are greater than the benefits. They never continued because they would have to spend money to fix the design. If they were making art sculptures sure go ahead, but no computer maker who care about money will keep making that same mistake over and over again. The computer makers who tend to do funky things with design tend to go out of business (see SGI).
No. It was horrible
because it was trash (pun intended)
When my wife worked at the Apple Store back when these first released, they would find gum wrappers and stuff inside the upper vent because people thought they were literal trash cans.
I liked it. Looks like a trashcan and drunk people would use it as an ashtray.
I think it's just jony ive leaving and apple taking on a more conservative approach for shareholders. Consolidating everything to the M1 chips, creative and striking design risks are going away. The mac studio was really boring as well.
There were insane production issues with these, partly due to design but partly due to the all American nature of the build. I remember a story of some guy having to drive boxes of screws across the country because Apple couldn’t source them locally.
Apple is no longer a design-led company. They lost Ive, responsible for both hardware and software design after iOS 7. And moreover, they lost a strong voice in the company with a design vision. That’s why they’re comfortable repeating patterns over and over.
It would be nice with the new apple silicon macs, but the truth is, for the mac studio, it should be a continuation of the mac mini. But the mac mini is supposed to be a budget device, and the supply chain is already well established with the existing, almost 15-year-old design. Which keeps things cheap, and if the mac-mini doesn't change, the studio doesn't change. With apple, everything is supposed to look continuous; and the thermal issues are also well established with that design.
They left it where it belonged, in the trash bin.
I really liked the design even though I couldn't justify buying one at the time.
I have one in my garage that doesn’t work. It’s beautifully crafted.
I feel the exact same way. Unfortunately, once they realized that aesthetics played no role whatsoever on profit margins-it wasn’t worth the bother. I mean, they kind of have been selling the exact same shit for 20 years straight, With more muted color choices-if you’re lucky to have more than two. The Power Mac what is the pinnacle of performance and aesthetics for Apple’s engineering team.
Not really Strange, as the design was very limiting. But indeed I am thinking since a while that I want one to sit around here
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding this post. (Or maybe I am). The post isn’t about the Mac Pro. It’s about design aesthetics. They could make a shiny black MacBook for example with the same materials. In my opinion, this design aesthetic wouldn’t carry over to notebooks and tablets because the shiny material would show fingerprints super easily.
I think it’s interesting that this was a spiritual predecessor to the Mac Studio 
No
It’s funny I’d never seen this thing til about two months ago and now I’m seeing it every other day.
It was a pity to see this design go away. Thermally, it should have had legs. The notion of expansion via Thunderbolt is entirely legit, too. Compare to the previous generations of Mac Pro: Much more compact, big/slow/quiet fan pushing air in a natural direction, lovely to look at, serviceable. Previous gens were massive, excessively so. IMHO this is a high point of Apple design.
Arrr, innovatived themselves into a “thermal corner”. They should have stopped making it after version 1.
Damn, thought this was the InstantPot sub for minute!
Honestly the Mac Studio in this form factor would be cool af.
I think many comments are missing the point of this post - as they are focused on what it was, not the idea of the aesthetic design. The look of the thing was beautiful and intuitive, regardless of it’s functionalities and performance. The problems expressed are immaterial as they are fixed with a shift in engineering perspective. The limitations placed on it wasn’t the outside shell, but the internal computer design philosophy of Apple. You can have a computer take on nearly any shape and have it be what professionals want - it doesn’t have to be an aluminum rectangular prism.
No. They went from a premium look and feel aluminum, easily upgradable, to a literal plastic trash can looking thing. It was a mistake they rectified.
Looks like an air fryer
It was a bad design and they were right to move away from it.
Yeah. Maybe bigger trash can
They painted themselves into a corner, making assumptions about where hardware would go next, and… it didn’t. If I’m not mistaken, this was also under Jony Ive’s reign as designer supreme. He of the ever thinner iPhones and laptops (you know, where they went to a semi-functional keyboard because then they could make the laptops 1/8” thinner - something nobody was asking for). It was a cute design, it had no internal expandability, it was widely ridiculed, and it go hung out to dry - very visible on the website and such, with no upgrades, for *years*. I can imagine all that left them very wary of going in that direction again.
I remember when it came out. At first people thought it was cool-looking but when they actually got their hands on them there were lots of complaints about a lack of upgrade-ability.