Apple’s senior director of Mac hardware product marketing, Tom Boger, announced that Apple’s redesigned, modular Mac Pro aimed at professionals is set to launch in 2019. “It’s not something for this year.” Apple is informing people now since professional customers may be weighing whether to buy an iMac Pro or hold off a few more months.
Phil Schiller, Apple’s global marketing chief, confirmed that work is continuing on a standalone monitor. The team responsible for revamping Apple’s pro product led by John Ternus has created a newly-disclosed group called the Pro Workflow Team and was there to provide more updates both on the Apple modular Mac Pro and how Apple is shaping it to meet the needs of real professional users.
As confirmed by Ternus, the primary focus is on visual effects, video editing, 3D animation, and music production. “And we’ve brought in some pretty incredible talent to build out workflows internally with real content and looking for what are the bottlenecks and how we can improve this.” He continues, “and then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck.”
Apple has been hiring incredibly talented artists and technicians in an effort to understand the real workflows that creative professionals use to better tailor its products to them. The Pro Workflow team, in addition to improving current Apple products, is also an essential part of Mac Pro development.
As for now, no further details have been provided on the shape of the next generation Mac Pro or the internal components that it might include, but as announced last year, Apple is still planning on a modular machine. Back then, Apple had been planning for an iMac Pro, and that it is “by definition” a modular system, Apple had also said about a pro display that was in development.
Panzarino thinks that no additional details about the Mac Pro will be heard at WWDC in June, and Apple will be quiet about the machine until next year.
