Mac Pro: Failure and Future
The irony in this piece (which Gassée is classy enough to only point to obliquely) is that what pros are clamoring for is for an Apple that&#x27;s less like Steve Jobs&#x27; Apple and more like Jean-Louis Gassée&#x27;s.<p>The trashcan Mac Pro came out after Jobs died, but in spirit it&#x27;s a classically Jobsian product: fascinated with aesthetics and style, disinterested in performance and expandability. It&#x27;s striking to look at, but required a whole bunch of increasingly painful compromises on the inside in order to make that visual statement possible.<p>Which makes it a lot like the original Mac, which was also a Jobsian product. Its revolutionary industrial design makes the 1984 Mac a wonderful object to contemplate even today; it&#x27;s like the Platonic ideal of the term &quot;personal computer.&quot; But the original Mac was also hobbled in important ways to fit Jobs&#x27; vision; it came with just 128K of RAM (low even by the standards of the time), and no mechanism was provided for adding expansion cards or other upgrades inside the enclosure. (It took two years for Apple to come out with a version that included a SCSI port!)<p>What the pros want, by contrast, is a Mac that puts functionality over aesthetics; it&#x27;s OK by them if it&#x27;s a big ugly box, if that big ugly box comes with cutting edge parts and can be stuffed full of RAM and drives and expansion cards. Which sounds a lot like Gassée&#x27;s baby when <i>he</i> was in charge of product design at Apple, the Mac II: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Macintosh_II" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Macintosh_II</a><p>The Mac II discarded the beautiful lunchbox form-factor of the original Mac completely, replacing it with... a big ugly box. But it was a big ugly box that was twice as fast as the lunchbox Mac, supported true-color graphics and had plenty of room for expansion, so the pros of the time <i>loved</i> it. The Mac II was the start of the long line of high-performance Macs that would make the Mac the go-to computer for people in creative industries.<p>So when pro users complain about there not being a Mac for them anymore, this is what they&#x27;re talking about. They want a modern Mac II. They want a Mac that&#x27;s less Steve Jobs and more Jean-Louis Gassée.