Dan Frakes at Macworld has now written 2 articles on how now is the time for a Mac Minitower (one is here, and the second is the editorial in the June 2013 issue of MacWorld), and I have to say I think he could not be more wrong!
Apple has already almost completely killed the current MacPro. It hasn’t truly been updated in many many years, and is no longer even on sale in the EU due to environmental regulations, and seems like Apple killed it, but Tim Cook has said that we should expect “something really great” sometime in 2013.
From what it sounds like while the MacPro does not lose money, it is not a money maker either, not like Apple’s other products, so they don’t need any stupid mini tower to split the market and make a MacPro that much less of a moneymaker.
What Apple needs to do needs to do is at the June 10th WWDC, announce their new MacPro, which should be a serious upgrade to the new MacPro, with the ability to use the latest and greatest video cards and pci cards (and I am talking the NVIDIA TITAN HERE) as well as having Thunderbolt technology and USB3 and yes still Firewire 800, as so many of us still use it (though SATA ports would be great too). And as many hard drives as they can cram in there. I would love an SSD for my system and an addition 6 drives spaces for a hardware raid 5, and yes I still want an optical drive, but can live with that externally if it means more drive space!
Apple please do not listen to Mr. Frakes! Don’t split your pro market, just make a new MacPro so that I don’t have to make my next tower a Windows machine, because once us high end graphics people, editors and designers all move to windows Apple will lose a lot of it’s cool!