Oh, you're so right! I mis-remembered and didn't bother to check through the article first. My mistake. (I knew the article from reading it when it was published.)

Still, I'd be surprised if they expected it to be any later than 2019. Historically they never give information out like that early at all, so for them to break precedent and announce anything seems to indicate that they're fairly confident. Hopefully it goes better than AirPower haha.

Just the opposite. All indications are that they hadn’t even started on the Mac Pro when they made the announcement, their way forward before then was the iMac Pro. I doubt they had any game plan at the time.

From what I've heard -- although my "little birdies" are probably much less reliable than Gruber's -- they had technically started on the Mac Pro when they made the announcement. But you're only off by a matter of weeks.

That would have to sting.

At that point the Mac Pro will have been _over five years_ since its last update (December 2013).

Of course Apple is still gleefully charging full price for Ivy Bridge (Xeon v2) processors, not to mention ~$600 for 32GB memory.

That has to sting.

Apple admitted they made a design mistake with the Mac Pro. It’s clear that they were originally planning to abandon the Mac Pro and release the iMac Pro to address the high end - along with operating system changes so Macs would work better with external GPUs.

Then they had an about face mid last year.

What I don’t understand is how hard is it for them to make a simple pro Mac in a tower case? I doubt that it takes PC manufacturers two years to design a mid tower high end workstation. Intel is doing most of the engineering and they (Apple) already have a very high performing SSD controller.