Marco Arment

So clearly, this has been dead for a long time.

The only thing I have to say retrospectively about it is, again, a repeat of things I've said in the past, but people don't listen to every episode.

The Mac Pro is essentially the only failure of Apple Silicon because the job of Apple Silicon was to replace Intel processors with Apple processors in all of Apple's products.

And it did do that eventually to great effect in every single product, to amazing effect in every product.

except one, and it's the Mac Pro.

And it's not because Apple had a difference of opinion and said, well, we don't need a big computer like the Mac Pro.

They planned to make a chip for the Mac Pro, but they could not do it economically.

There was at least the M1 plan for like the M1, like big giant mega processor.

yeah the quad stuck together chip um there was diagrams of it there was things leaked from apple or whatever i'm not sure how far extended past that german says in 2022 they can their final plan for like a quad processor or whatever but it's a thing that they wanted to do but they could not do it and there's a million reasons why like you're not going to sell a lot of them it's very expensive yada yada

Like, it makes sense, but it is the one failure.

And lots of people are saying, okay, but that was a different era.

Nobody needs expandable RAM or internal storage or slots.

All those things are, you know, we don't need those anymore.

Setting aside whether there's really zero use for slots, I mean, part of that is Apple's decision to not support third-party GPUs, but setting that aside, especially in the AI age, I would argue that potentially having a giant case stocked with a bunch of NVIDIA GPUs for doing AI stuff would actually be a useful thing, but Apple doesn't get along with NVIDIA anyway.

Set the slots aside entirely.

Just within the realm of is there any room in Apple's product line for something that is not something more powerful than Mac Studio?

I've always said and I continue to say absolutely yes.

And here's why.

Right now, we have great examples of applications that run on Macs that we wish would go faster, that we wish had more capability.

Local models, local AI models.