Hartley Charlton
Eleven years ago, Apple released the controversial “trash can” Mac Pro, introducing one of its most critical designs ever, and one that endured during a period of widespread discontent with the Mac lineup.
The redesign took the Mac Pro in an entirely new direction, led by a polished aluminum cylindrical design that was informally nicknamed the “trash can” in the Mac community. All of the Mac Pro's components were mounted around a central heat sink core, cooled by a single fan that pulled air from underneath the chassis, through the core, and out the top. The fan can spin slower than smaller fans, keeping your Mac extremely quiet even during intensive work.
Apple announced a radically redesigned Mac Pro at the 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). During the announcement, Apple's Phil Schiller infamously remarked, “I can't invent anything anymore, dammit.” The comment was aimed at critics who pointed to the previous Mac Pro's lack of upgrades and claimed that Apple had largely abandoned its professional user base and was running out of ideas.
Phil Schiller unveils the redesigned Mac Pro in 2013
Apple claimed that the new Mac Pro offers twice the overall performance of the previous generation while taking up less than an eighth of the volume, thanks to its unified thermal core. Mac Pro paired Intel Xeon processors with dual AMD FirePro workstation GPUs, allowing it to deliver seven teraflops of computing power.
While the striking design was undoubtedly ambitious, users were unhappy that almost all expansion had to be served externally via Thunderbolt 2 ports. Many professional users who rely on powerful hardware couldn't get over the Mac Pro's lack of internal slots for adding graphics cards and memory.
The result was a device that couldn't adapt to changing hardware trends. Even Apple seemed at a loss for how to offer a meaningful hardware upgrade for the Mac Pro; back in 2019, you could buy a brand new trash can Mac Pro. from Apple, and there had been no updates to the device in the previous six years.
This led Apple to make a rare admission of product failure during a meeting with reporters in April 2017, detailing why the device hadn't succeeded as well as it had hoped. In 2019, Apple's full penance came in the form of another redesign of the Mac Pro, which returned the machine to a highly modular tower form factor with eight PCIe slots and three impeller fans.
Still, in many ways, what the 2013 Mac Pro wanted to achieve – a small, powerful computer for professionals with the ability to expand externally – lives on, and has been more effectively realized by the Mac Studio.
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