‘Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro will be shaped by workflows’

Matthew Panzarino reporting for TechCrunch

“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.” In addition to transparency for pro customers on an individual basis, there’s also a larger fiscal reasoning behind it.

“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,” says Boger.

Before the news last year that a new Mac Pro was coming, a friend of mine confided that her team had been waiting for an update for years. They needed new hardware and were hoping a new Mac Pro was around the corner. While they were heavily invested in the Mac platform, they bit the bullet and switched to PC/Windows because the platform offered updated hardware that could do what they needed today. This reminded me that clients and deadlines won’t wait for Apple. They did what they had to.

Enterprise, professional studios and even the education market depend on product roadmaps, predictable refreshes and launches to do their budgets. It’s very difficult to budget for something when you have no idea when or if it’s going to materialize. As I said in yesterday’s post, Apple is very secretive, and I don’t expect that to change. This time, Apple did the right thing by taming expectations early by communicating to the folks that have been waiting. I’m glad Apple is being preemptive in this regard. If this is Apple’s new M.O., then it’s good news and about time.