I think the change is that Apple isn't closing the plant all-together.

"Apple made the previous Mac Pro in Austin, Texas, beginning in 2013. But with the new Mac Pro unveiled this month being made in China, Apple is "shifting abroad production of what had been its only major device assembled in the US as trade tensions escalate between the Trump administration and Beijing," The Wall Street Journal reported today."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/apple...

That said, this all feels somewhat self-inflicted. One wonders if the tariffs on imports from China hadn't been put in place, perhaps Apple wouldn't have wanted to move production of this model out of the US.

I mean it has to have been all but closed for years right? The only thing they ever made was a giant flop that never got a meaningful update. What could they possibly have been making for the last several years?

The old Mac Pro was never updated, but they never stopped production of them.

Yes, my point is how many units could they possibly be making. Even when it was new it barely sold, how many units could they be making today? Dozens a month?

Macstadium buys hundreds of them every month.

https://mobile.twitter.com/brianstucki/status/11334877389156...

Fascinating thread with pictures, thanks man!

Probably more like a few hundred a month. But still, I can't imagine it employing many people at all unless they also used for overflow assembly or something.

Do you have a reference for that? I assume they sold about as well as past MacPros, which would also be much smaller volume than iMacs and MacBooks.

Anecdotally, I've literally never seen a trash-can Mac pro outside an Apple store (and I even have friends that work at Apple).

That a huge change from a decade or more ago, when Mac pro towers were under every desk on designer teams and ubiquitous at Mac developer shops. The MBP laptops just didn't have enough grunt at the time.

With the previous Mac Pro they made a big deal right away from the fact that it was being made in Texas. Since they didn't do that this time around many people were wondering if they shifted production over seas. This is Apple quelling those rumors. Also:

> The value of American-made components in the new Mac Pro is 2.5 times greater than in Apple’s previous generation Mac Pro.

Isn’t the MSRP also 2x of the precious gen Mac Pro? ($6k vs $3k)

Good point. I'd like to see one of the absolute numbers in addition to the ratio; otherwise the cynical interpretation (which is kind of the appropriate interpretation for PR speak) is, "So the American-made portion used to be 1% of the cost and it's now 2.5%, eh?" (Or 1.25% if the MSRP has a constant ratio to the parts cost.)

Yep, intel raised their prices, oh and don't forget the T2 spy chip that's probably also made in the USA.

>T2 spy chip

What are you trying to say here?

He might be referring to the fact it is closed source and there is no way anyone could figure out what it really does.

There's a documented white paper about what it does and you can examine network traffic to determine if it's doing anything claimed. Even today, there are people that have flags and filters set up for traffic coming from these devices. I don't think there's much to worry about here but it's good to see that people are skeptical. People take their data for granted far too often.

In addition to real time encryption, it also handles sound and siri, which presumably involve some form of remote communication. I trust Apple as much as NSA, MacOS is closed but it's pretty controllable, T2 Chip is not.

He/She is just trying to be cute. The T2 is a security chip that, ironically (in the context of the parent,) makes spying more difficult since it's on-device security.