Re:Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results
by chipotle_coyote on Wednesday February 01, 2017 @12:41AM
(#13538570)
Yeah, that's about my guess, too. They had a design that worked fine for the components they had when they made it, but the next generation of components changed just enough that things went south. Maybe the cooling didn't quite work reliably anymore, or they couldn't get the support hardware on the same tiny boards...who knows. But I'm betting it's not that they just ignored the Mac Pro and never thought about revving it--it's that they tried a revision and never got it to work reliably, and they realized that they'd innovated their asses into a corner.
I suspect that the custom hardware has something to do about it. They have basically custom everything and a cooling solution that probably prevent them to shop around for easy GPU upgrade. The engineering cost must be awful just to duplicate the performance level you can get with off-the-shelves component. Even server grade components can fit in tiny "alright looking" cases nowadays.