Apple’s redesigned Mac Pro is coming in 2019 .

The overhaul of Apple’s most performant desktop Mac involves just a little more waiting

By Nick Statt 

on April 5, 2018 11:32 am

  

Apple’s long-awaited update to the 2013 Mac Pro won’t be released until sometime next year, the company confirmed in an interview with TechCrunch. We’ve known since a press roundtable in April 2017 that Apple was “completely rethinking” the Mac Pro, in the words of marketing chief Phil Schiller. Now, we have confirmation that the product is arriving next year after some speculation that it could make an appearance this year at a fall hardware event typically reserved for MacBook announcements.

“We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It’s not something for this year,” Tom Boger, Apple’s senior director of Mac hardware product marketing, told TechCrunch. “In addition to transparency for pro customers on an individual basis, there’s also a larger fiscal reasoning behind it.”

APPLE WANTS PRO CONSUMERS TO KNOW THEY’LL BE WAITING AT LEAST ANOTHER YEAR FOR THE MAC PRO

Apple understands that its new iMac Pro has a substantial crossover with the customer that might purchase the updated Mac Pro, and so the company wants to give some timeline clarity to help those pro users better grasp where the products stand in the pipeline. “We know that there’s a lot of customers today that are making purchase decisions on the iMac Pro and whether or not they should wait for the Mac Pro,” Boger added.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about the device. First and foremost, we’re unsure what shape it will take. The trashcan-style design of the Mac Pro was divisive, yet it was an integral design decision from Apple to enable a more modular setup with easier access to core components like memory and graphics. “As we said a year ago working on modular was inherently a modular system and in looking at our customers and their workflows obviously that’s a real need for our customers and that’s the direction we’re going,” Boger said in the interview.

Apple has also created an all-new internal team, called the Pro Workflow Team, dedicated to coordinating efforts across the company’s hardware and software teams to better ensure the end product meets the needs of the core target audience. In other words, Apple needs Final Cut Pro to run well on the new Mac Pro, so the Pro Workflow Team helps keep those two projects closely aligned. The workflow team is also tasked with interfacing directly with pro consumers and the communities of workers who use Apple hardware and software across graphic design, film editing, animation, and other industries.

There is also some talk now that the new Mac Pro may be one of the first devices Apple outfits with an ARM-based processor, as part of its groundbreaking shift away from Intel chips revealed by Bloomberg earlier this week. The timeline for that to happen is 2020, so it seems unlikely the new Mac Pro would use an all-new custom Apple chip set. But it is a possibility. Unfortunately, we won’t probably hear more about the new Mac Pro until much later this year, and even then details are likely to be sparse.

Don't Buy an Apple Laptop Until the New MacBook Air Comes Out

The MacBook Air hasn’t gotten much love from Apple over the past few years, but that could finally change this spring. A new report from popular Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (via MacRumors) claims we could get a cheaper MacBook Air in the next few months, and, until that happens, you should probably hold off on buying any new Apple laptop.

Kuo doesn’t go into any details beyond the price, which would drop below the current $999. It’s also unclear if this means Apple will bring back the smaller 11-inch Macbook Air (discontinued back in 2016) or simply slash costs for the current 13-inch laptop.

Either way, it could also be an opportunity to upgrade some of the hardware. Last June, Apple gave the MacBook Air a slight refresh, bumping up its processor speed but ignoring the aging screen—it still can’t display at full HD quality. We might also get a USB-C port, but personally I still prefer the old MagSafe charging method.

The simple truth is, despite years of neglect, the MacBook Air is still a great laptop. It represents a peak moment in Apple’s design history, just before the company decided that the best way forward was to remove the features people actually liked (MagSafe, the iPhone headphone jack, a decent laptop keyboard, etc).

If you care more about flashy features, like the useless MacBook Touch Bar or the actually-pretty-handy MacBook Pro Touch ID, then you probably shouldn’t wait around for this new MacBook Air. But if you want an incredibly solid laptop that won’t let you down, the MacBook Air is the way to go. Hopefully in a few months we’ll see the Air make the leap into 2018 with better hardware, or, at the very least, a lower price tag.