But I think the Mac Pro was never really trying to be on your desk in the first place. For a lot of its target users, it lived under the desk or in a rack, and the size wasn't about aesthetics so much as airflow, expansion, and serviceability
The interesting question is whether they'll lean into it intentionally (better tooling, more ML-focused APIs) or just keep treating it as a side effect of their silicon design
I think we’ll see a much more robust ecosystem develop around MLX now that agentic coding has reduced the barrier of porting and maintaining libraries to it.
It totally makes sense. Mac Studio basically ate the Mac Pro's lunch. But it's still kind of sad. The Mac Pro used to represent this idea that Apple cared about the absolute high-end, no-compromises workstation crowd
To me, this discontinuation is less about the product and more about making a statement. The M2 Mac Pro was a dysfunctional product of an internal conflict of interests, but it cast a ray of hope that the M series would develop past the current scaled-up-but-still-disposable phone/embedded SoCs and that Apple had some interest in bringing them closer to the offerings of the competitors from the workstation/server market. Now, with this move, they've made it clear that they would rather give up an entire segment than make at least a narrow part of their ecosystem open enough for the PCIe slots of the Mac Pro to find any serious use.
Pretty much yeah, that SCADA system was in 2012 and the complexity was off the charts: electric panels, Allen Bradley expensive hardware and software, ladder/C#/MSSQL/historianDB/etc tech stack, modbus/profibus/hart protocols, it is a nightmare to maintain, even editing the HMI was a process by itself. If that project would be done now, probably won’t cost 25% of the original cost.
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