On the Accidental Tech Podcast from the other day it was hinted they heard rumors that Apple engineers did try and do some spec bumps, but they kept running into thermal problems no matter what they tried.

I guess they were really really close to the edge with that design, and Marco said he's heard those GPUs are failing from heat issues fairly often.

That's not just rumors. In the interview, Craig Federighi said: > I’d say longer than six months ago. But I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will. We designed a system that we thought with the kind of GPUs that at the time we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two GPU architecture… that that was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But workloads didn’t materialize to fit that as broadly as we hoped.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/transcript-phil-schiller-c...

Sorry, I worded that funny. Federighi confirmed it so it's not a rumor now, but I meant that they had heard those rumors before this announcement.

Shouldn't new chips with a smaller process be cooler?

Engineers, and especially the hardware kind, are a limited resource. Not that Apple couldn't spend even more than they currently are on growth, but they're reaching some limits, and until later this year office space is/will be one of them.

This is combined with the fact that the Mac Pro sells in the "low single digit" percentage range of Mac sales means that it's hard to justify an outsized expense. When factoring in R&D costs, my guess is the Mac Pro has much lower margins than other Macs.

That kind of "accountant" style thinking has brought them to the brink with developers and media pros.

Killing off the development platform for your successful products is incredibly shortsighted.

Rest assured office space will remain a challenge even after this year. Take a spin around Mathilda and Maude.

Every single digit of mac unit sales the Mac Pro constitutes is $700M+ in yearly revenues.