Update: Apple confirms that new models and designs of the Mac Pro desktop are in the works for likely release in 2013 (but they said there's nothing yet to say about the iMac.)
Andy Hertzfeld, the software wizard who wrote a lot of the original operating system for Apple's Mac, took the company to task yesterday for quietly releasing — as in not mentioning it onstage at the Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday — a meager update to the Mac Pro desktop, "Apple's top of the line, expandable Macintosh, aimed at users who need lots of computing power and disk storage, like programmers or other professionals. "
When Hertzfeld, who now works at Google, went to the Apple store, he found that Apple did indeed update the Mac Pro, though stage time at WWDC was devoted to faster new MacBook Air notebooks, updated MacBook Pro notebooks and a new high-end MacBook Pro with a high resolution Retina Display.
This is what Hertzfeld had to say about it:
The specs for the "new" Mac Pro had hardly changed, except for a tiny, inconsequential processor clock bump. Still no Thunderbolt, still no USB 3.0, no SATA III or RAM speed improvements - it seems like it's stuck in time in 2010. The only thing that's still high-end about it is the bloated price.
Even though I'm well aware that Apple's future lies increasingly with mobile iOS-based devices, it still makes no sense to drop the ball on your high end desktop Mac so thoroughly, and to utterly disappoint your most loyal customers like yours truly. Why do an update at all if you hardly change anything?
The Mac Pro, starting at $2,499, hadn't been updated since 2010, so some mention of it might have been warranted. What does Apple say?
An Apple spokesman just told me that new models and new designs of the Mac Pro are in the works and will likely be released in 2013. That confirms what New York Times columnist David Pogue said yesterday, citing an unnamed Apple executive, about Apple's commitment to its desktop computers.
