Apple Envisioned New Mac Pro's 'Cheese Grater' Design Years Ago
Following the reveal of its much-anticipated Mac Pro redesign at WWDC 2019 on Monday, a handful of reporters met with Apple's marketing chief Phil Schiller and other executives to learn a bit more about the powerhouse machine.

Apple's all-new Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR via The Verge Ina Fried of Axios has provided a few key takeaways from the conversation:
- Apple's vision for the new Mac Pro's design changed some and it took somewhat longer than it was anticipating.
- The circular cutouts on the front and back of the new Mac Pro are made by machining out spheres from the solid aluminum chassis. This particular aspect of the design was floating around in Apple's design labs before the new Mac Pro was even on its roadmap.
- For those who missed the news, Apple is planning a rack-mounted version of the Mac Pro with a different chassis appropriate for a data center. Apple says this version will be available in the fall.
- The new Pro Display XDR was "front and center" to Apple and is designed to rival so-called reference monitors that can cost over $10,000.
Other tidbits may surface from other reporters who attended this press briefing, in which case we'll update this post.
Popular Stories
Apple once developed "M2 Extreme" and "M3 Extreme" chips for the Mac Pro, but it decided not to release them, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. He first reported on this topic in 2022, and he touched on it again in his Power On newsletter today.
"Extreme" chips would have had twice as many CPU and GPU cores as Apple's "Ultra" chips.
"The idea was to offer twice as many graphics and...
Apple developed two Mac Pro models in recent years that never made it to market, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
In his latest "Power On" newsletter, Gurman revealed that Apple internally developed two unreleased Mac Pro projects codenamed J170 and J190 before ultimately discontinuing the machine altogether.
As for new Mac Pro hardware, there were two additional models developed by...
Apple announced the original Mac Pro 20 years ago today, with the anniversary landing five months after the company discontinued the machine for good.
On August 7, 2006, Apple unveiled the first Mac Pro, powered by two dual-core 64-bit Xeon processors that Apple said made it up to twice as fast as the Power Mac G5 it replaced. It was the last Mac to complete Apple's transition from PowerPC...