Report: Some insights into the new Mac Pro development


TechCrunch has a feature on the upcoming revamped Mac Pro. The information came from a visit with Apple and we learned some interesting bits. Namely, an updated timeline that the new Mac isn't expected until next year. Also, Apple has a diverse team working on the design.

Now, it’s a year later and Apple has created a team inside the building that houses its pro products group. It’s called the Pro Workflow Team, and they haven’t talked about it publicly before today. The group is under John Ternus and works closely with the engineering organization. The bays that I’m taken to later to chat about Final Cut Pro, for instance, are a few doors away from the engineers tasked with making it run great on Apple hardware.

"We said in the meeting last year that the pro community isn’t one thing," says Ternus. "It’s very diverse. There’s many different types of pros and obviously they go really deep into the hardware and software and are pushing everything to its limit. So one thing you have to do is we need to be engaging with the customers to really understand their needs. Because we want to provide complete pro solutions, not just deliver big hardware, which we’re doing and we did it with iMac Pro. But look at everything holistically."

To do that, Ternus says, they want their architects sitting with real customers to understand their actual flow and to see what they’re doing in real time. The challenge with that, unfortunately, is that though customers are typically very responsive when Apple comes calling, it’s not always easy to get what they want because they may be using proprietary content.


The report said that Apple has hired creative professionals either as employees or on contract to provide insights into their needs. This is an interesting approach that goes well beyond anything like a focus group or customer engagement.

Not much new was provided on the design of the machine, but Apple appears to still be committed to some kind of modular design. Meaning it's components likely won't be integrated together like Apple has done for the past years. Hopefully, things like storage, GPU and maybe even CPU can be accessed by customers for future upgrades to extend the life of the machines.