bloodshotrollin'red

chasm said:

The "cheese grater" Mac Pro was indeed a tough, dependable (at least in some incarnations) and workhorse Mac, but "best ever" is a very loaded term. "Not for my mother it wasn't" would be my snap reply, and not really for me, either. My nomination for the best Mac ever would be -- actually -- the highly-upgradeable and dependable computer I'm typing this on, a 2012 MacBook Pro.

This model had USB 3.0 before that had really gone mainstream, Bluetooth 4.0 before that went mainstream, Thunderbolt (okay, v1, but still -- faster than any other connector at the time and still faster than everything but some USB-C varieties and later Thunderbolts), and the option of a retina display. Swap out the old HD for SSD and max out the ram to 16GB, and you have in 2018 a machine that isn't out-of-date for 90+ percent of the things typical users really use it for. All this and an SD card slot, booya!

As 'puter literate as your dear mum may be, I suspect a MacPro would be about as useful to her as taking trips to the shops using a NASA Space Shuttle.

Apple concentrate their product functionality around making it as much of a finished consumer product as, say a TV or a toaster. People don't mess about with their white-goods products; they're purchased and used till they drop. Wintelinux PC's/Mac's are akin to family cars; contraptions many purchasers of which are itchin' to soup-up from the get-go. In Macopolis quite a few of us simply love personalising our Mac's with the best/cutting-edge tech we can squeeze in to our creations. We also had the ability to put any operating system on to any of our hot-pluggable HDD's, and best of all we could run everything in 64bit. That greater cheese could smoke many high-end PC's and came with hardware/firmware/software tech many PC users would have to wait a number of years for.

So, I'm really looking for Apple to not drop the ball on the next MacPro.