An Intention Upgrade

A mere six days before the 50th anniversary of Apple, the company quietly did something it has clearly wanted to do for a long time.

It killed the Mac Pro, a device with a lineage that dates back decades. While it has only been a Mac Pro since 2006, its real roots probably lie in the PowerMac G3 Blue & White, the first new tower produced since Steve Jobs’ return to Apple.

That device combined upgradeability with design chops, using a provocative metal-plus-plastic design to create a visual language that was all Apple’s. The most recent Mac Pro, and pretty much every Mac Pro since 2006, has been surrounded in metal. But that was the machine that set the stage for what this top-level Mac was supposed to be: A highly upgradeable screamer.

Again, there is no reason Apple needed to make this decision now. It could have just kept selling the M2 Ultra Mac Pro for a few more years. (Hey, it did it with the trash can.) But the decision to do so just before an important anniversary in its history? That’s sending a message.

The message is simple: We’re not about PCIe ports, we’re about buy-once, upgrade-never devices. Every other device in Apple’s lineup, barring a storage upgrade forced out of the Mac Mini and Mac Studio by clever hardware hackers, has avoided upgrades. And it’s done so for a long time.

The last laptop to offer upgradeable RAM was the 2012 MacBook Pro. It’s been about five years since Apple has offered an iMac or Mac Mini capable of aftermarket RAM upgrades. It’s not like the company was hiding it from us. This is what Apple is: A company that asks you to buy the most powerful machine you can afford up front, and then do it again in five to seven years.

Apple is not a company afraid of symbolism in the choices it makes. The original iMac famously eschewed legacy ports and floppy drives in favor of next-generation peripheral paradigms. The company dropped USB-A from its laptops when it was the most widely used port in the world. (Still is, honestly.) And Apple infamously avoided putting a fan in the earliest Macintosh units when those devices certainly could have used them.

I think the message Apple sends with this move is that a Mac is not the computer you buy if you want to open up the machine. Nor is it the machine you buy if you need ultra-specialized technology built by somebody else. Through slow decision-making and the minimization of key features desired by ultra-high-end professionals (i.e. external or third-party GPUs, and before that, any support for Nvidia GPUs at all), the company self-selected its audience. For a while, Apple sort of let this community live by essentially ignoring the Hackintosh community, essentially avoiding becoming a Nintendo-style heavy, going after its own enthusiast base. (On that Nvidia point, the bitterness is so strong that the company tried to avoid using them for Apple Intelligence. Maybe Tim has let this beef go too far?)

Meanwhile, it tried solving the problems that plagued portions of that user base in different ways. It continued improving Thunderbolt until it got to the point where it was good enough for most use cases that don’t involve graphics but might have involved a PCIe slot. It built the Mac Studio, a small-meets-fast take on a machine that Apple has periodically tried to build at various points over the past quarter-century. (The G4 Cube was obviously where Apple wanted to go, but the miniaturization just wasn’t there.)

Last year, I explained that Canva’s decision to make its Affinity graphics software free was a move to neutralize the power users. For large companies, power users carry a stigma of sorts. They complain a lot. They want more specific things. And they have high expectations that are often more technical in nature.

Apple marks a lot of its products as “pro,” sure, but it has never wanted to be in the power user business. Sure, it might offer AppleScript or Automator, but it doesn’t expect 90% of people to even know what those are, let alone use them.

The downside for actual power users is that there are no real alternatives to the quite-impressive ARM architecture the company has built over the past decade. I spotted a few people in the vintage Apple community suggesting that ARM chips just aren’t good enough for professional tasks, but that’s pure cope. They just want the giant device with no compromises because of the power-user message it sends.

But Apple is a company that expects you to compromise. In 2012, when I bought my first MacBook Pro, the compromise was “you can either get the thinner machine with the nicer screen and no upgradeable RAM, or the old machine that’s a lot thicker and still has those RAM slots.” The MacBook Neo is a bet that you are willing to compromise on RAM and a backlit keyboard; the MacBook Air is a bet that you’re willing to compromise on having a fan in your laptop. Even the Mac Studio, which until recently allowed you to spec it with half a terabyte of RAM, was a bet that you’re willing to compromise a lot of money and internal upgradeability for a machine that screams.

There’s nothing wrong with you if you don’t want to compromise, if your favorite parts of Apple were the parts that you could jailbreak or Hackintosh your way around. But with the decision to retire the Mac Pro, a device that Apple has only half-heartedly sold for the past 15 years, Apple is making explicit what has been obvious for decades: It is not the power user company.

Sure, you can harness powerful things with Macs or iPhones or iPads. But this company would rather you think of your computers like appliances that serve a purpose and eventually get replaced. Don’t like that? Plenty of other ecosystems can serve you. I hear Linux is getting pretty good these days.

That’s the message that will carry Apple into the next 50 years.