If you’ve been waiting patiently to upgrade to a new top-of-the-line professional Apple desktop computer, keep waiting.
Apple confirmed to TechCrunch today (April 5) that it won’t be releasing a new Mac Pro, its desktop aimed at designers, creatives, engineers, and others who need modular, high-powered Macs, until 2019. There was some hope that after the company admitted last year it was starting over on the design of the Mac Pro line after the trashcan-shaped model first released in 2013—that a new model would be released in 2018. Now it appears that’s not happening.
“We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product,” Tom Boger, director of Mac hardware product marketing, told TechCrunch. “It’s not something for this year.”
This will hopefully be useful, if bittersweet, news for businesses forecasting spending for the rest of 2018, as the company said that there’s no chance it will unexpectedly drop a Mac Pro on the market in the second half.
Apple has created a new division called the Pro Workflow Team, a combination of hardware and software designers that will ensure that the company is creating products that are actually useful to the professional market. Members of this team will also sit with actual customers to better understand how products are used.
“We’re getting a much much much deeper understanding of our pro customers and their workflows and really understanding not only where the state of the art is today but where the state of the art is going and all of that is really informing the work that we’re doing on the Mac Pro and we’re working really really hard on it,” Boger said.
Specifics about the next computer weren’t really discussed, although Apple did confirm that it will still be modular (where owners can swap in and out more memory or storage). Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the next Mac Pro will likely run on Apple-built processors, instead of Intel chips.
Still, if you can’t hold out another year for a high-end Mac desktop, there is always the powerful, but not customizable, $5,000 iMac Pro, which Apple launched in December.