Every major product announcement is about more than the product itself: it also is a signal towards the priorities and goals of the company. In this way, companies like Apple that make a big song and dance of their releases can communicate things by omission. The neglect of proper updates to the Mac Pro, a controversial update to the MacBook Pro, and many of Apple’s software decisions had left professionals feeling like Apple had begun to turn their back on them. Back in March, Tim Cook admitted the company made mistakes, and the WWDC keynote seems to prove that commitment, even if it will take until December for the company to deliver.
Of course, the move is bound to attract its fair share of critics. The all-in-one form factor has always failed to gain traction in the professional space, since IT departments generally preferred the more easy-to-service traditional desktops. However, the success of the Surface Workstation opened the door for a move to look a little less bold and one that—even if Microsoft beat them to the punch—at least feels decidedly more Apple.
The price also puts it well outside of even most of the “prosumer” market that makes up a lot of the high-end technology market. Though Apple has touted that the iMac Pro will be cheaper than the equivalent PC, even your typical insane gaming rig is going to have nowhere near those stats. This is truly a professional machine in the deepest sense possible. The power that it provides simply isn’t from having bleeding edge hardware, it’s from packing it full of it.
Though I’ve owned various Mac laptops over the years as well as one of the older Mac Pros (that shared the same case as the PowerMac G5), I’ve always strayed away from the iMac personally simply due to the fact that, if I’m going to invest in a desktop, I want upgradability. But this circumvents the problem entirely by providing something with specs so ridiculous that the ultimately the motivating factor for an upgrade wouldn’t be lack of power or space but instead features.
Even more excitingly, though, this deepens my confidence that my recent switch back to the Mac world after many years of being almost exclusively PC (minus a year of owning a MacBook Air I barely used) is not in vain, as Apple is ensuring it does not lose sight of the professional community that gave it a lot of its gains outside of the mobile and music space over the past couple of decades.
Around the time of the Intel switch a little over a decade ago, the idea of a Mac as a serious machine for tech folks was considered laughable. Only through the addition of Boot Camp did people begin to take Macs seriously. Around that time, I was working as an intern in the rather monolithic Emory University IT department, and there was a proliferation of Macs in that department for the first time.
Ten years later, the development world is full of Macs. We’re at a point where Windows Ruby developers usually compelled to install a Linux virtual machine simply because so many Ruby gems are built consistently for anything but the Unix version, simply because Macs have proliferated so much in the Ruby development space.
Though, with most languages and frameworks, the platform differences are a lot more manageable, outside of the .NET world, the MacBook Pro is a ubiquitous sight. That’s why many of the changes in the last generation—the thinner form factor and the switch to only Type-C ports—had a lot of the professional world concerned, as it seemed to focus on sleekness and style over improvements in power.
The decision to drop the other ports will likely ultimately benefit the tech industry by incentivizing movement towards a new, common standard to replace the old USB Type-A ports that have been a mainstay of both Macs and PCs for the better part of two decades. Of course, a laptop with the power of the iMac Pro would be impractical, given issues of power consumption and simple hardware space, but it renews hope that we can see some big steps forward with the refreshed MacBook Pro form factor not just in sexiness but power.
Admittedly, some of Apple’s MacBook Pro woes are not particularly their fault. Intel has struggled to offer upgrades to their CPUs that are as compelling in recent years due to the fact that we are finally reaching a point where it is difficult to make transistors even smaller simply due to the laws of physics—the transistors are only a few silicon atoms thick now.
This also leads me to wonder if we’ll see a “Pro” iPhone now, given we have Pro versions of the other two pieces of “i” hardware. There are rumors of a higher-end iPhone to celebrate the 10th anniversary, so one might expect to see the Pro moniker there. Whether or not it would be capable of converting this Android fangirl remains to be seen.
Regardless of whether or not I wind up justifying shelling out mountain of cash for one, though, the big takeaway from WWDC for me was nothing about iOS or a Siri speaker, it was that Apple is committed to ensuring that they will retain the developer community they fought so hard to win.