The Mac Pro and MacBook Pro are still very capable, solid, and focused machines. Go into any dev shop on the planet and you will see that's true. The only point your comment is right on is the Pro moniker being attached to an iPad.
So we're getting one next week - but why not sooner? That was one of the takeaways from this article. Pace of innovation has slowed under Tim Cook.
The only difference this year is that Intel has been having problems delivering on time (and without problems).
That is the entire difference. You're correct in that this is the expected time between redesigns, but we also haven't gotten a spec bump in over a year. That's unusual, and it's giving real fuel to the usually-overblown "[product] is so stale!"
The only thing that Apple could have done is bump the CPU, which would have not gained anything in terms of power savings or any other changes, and means now you have one more model you have to stock replacement parts for.
This has been an issue not just for laptops, but also for their Xeon line-up in servers. Due to manufacturing delays the v4 for the Xeon line-up was released earlier this year, and didn't really get started shipping until April.
And even that is not necessarily true anymore. The iMac tends to beat it on many tasks now. At this point, people buy it because they really want to bring their own monitor, or they just can't imagine an iMac could be faster, or they are one of the few people doing something the Mac Pro is still better at.
The iMac has a much broader appeal, the market is demanding but not to the same extreme. Many designers use these machines because they've got great screens and acceptable levels of performance.
I'm not sure Apple can win in the Mac Pro space without losing a ton of money. HP and Dell make high-end workstations, but it's a very tiny market compared to their general desktop and server sales.
Apple likes to focus on products it can sell millions of, not tens of thousands.
But none of that changes the fact that the Mac Pro is not "still very capable" as stated in the comment I replied to.
It's terrible for rendering on CPU. It's limited in terms of expansion. It will never compete against a self-built machine.
Maybe they will kill it, but it'll be a shame if they do. The Xserve died for the same reasons: They couldn't field a competitive machine.
At some point maybe Apple will offer their OS for use on non-Apple hardware under some kind of "if it works, great" type basis, you know, for enthusiasts and people who need way more power than Apple can deliver. Maybe it'll be called something other than macOS, just like NeXTStep's OS became OpenStep?
1. I want to legally run OSX on top-of-the-line hardware.
I don't want a fancy design that's unnecessarily difficult to rack-mount or store anywhere, I don't want to try out new ports while abandoning common ones, and I certainly don't want to be 3 years behind.
A matte black rectangle would be a lot better than this. Why the need to be so fancy, to the detriment of your actual users?
It's hard to be happy with that little trash can.
The tower models were great. It's a shame Apple stopped updating those.
They're not powerhouse workstations like they used to be where it's all about performance.