Apple Launched the Controversial ‘Trashcan’ Mac Pro 11 Years Ago Today

Apple launches controversial ‘trash can’ Mac Pro Eleven years ago today, one of the most criticized designs ever launched, one that endured during a period of widespread dissatisfaction with the Mac line.

The redesign takes the Mac Pro in a whole new direction, spearheaded by a polished aluminum cylindrical design that’s informally known among the Mac community as the “trash can.” All of the Mac Pro’s components are mounted around a central cooling core and are cooled by a single fan that pulls air from underneath the case, through the core, and out the top. The fan spins more slowly than smaller fans, keeping your Mac extremely quiet even during intense operation.

Apple announced a completely redesigned Mac Pro at the 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Phil Schiller The infamous line “Can’t innovate anymore, my asshole.” The comment was directed at critics who pointed to the previous Mac Pro’s lack of updates and claimed that Apple had essentially abandoned its professional user base and was out of ideas.

Apple says that thanks to a unified cooling core, the new Mac Pro has twice the overall performance of the previous generation while being less than one-eighth the size. Mac Pro combines an Intel Xeon processor with dual AMD FirePro workstation GPUs, allowing it to deliver 7 teraflops of computing power.

While the eye-catching design is undoubtedly ambitious, users were dissatisfied with the way that almost all expanded functionality had to be served externally via the Thunderbolt 2 port. Many pro users who rely on powerful hardware can’t overcome the Mac Pro’s lack of internal slots to add graphics cards and memory.

The result is devices that are unable to adapt to changing hardware trends. Even Apple seems unsure of how to provide a meaningful hardware update to the Mac Pro; as recently as 2019, one could buy a brand new trash-can “Mac Pro” from Apple, and the device hasn’t had any upgrades in the past six years .

This led Apple to make Rarely admit product failure In a meeting with reporters in April 2017, it was explained in detail why the device did not succeed as expected. In 2019, Apple’s outright apology came in the form of another Mac Pro redesign, which returned the machine to a highly modular tower form factor with 8 PCIe slots and 3 impeller fans.

In many ways, however, the original intent of the 2013 Mac Pro—a small, powerful computer for professionals, with only external expansion—is still there, and has been executed more effectively. Mac Studio.