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Comment by cooper12 | Hacker News Reader

I think Gruber addresses this pretty well: they already took the silent approach, but it was becoming unsustainable with their pro market, whose needs were not being met. If they just did a small hardware bump, they'd be projecting that they'd given up on the pro and they'd lose a lot of loyalty and goodwill. People can only wait so long so this info helps to keep them interested and bring the term "Apple" back into the vocabulary of any pro considering a future purchase.

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Missing the point though. It's not just the hardware, it's the trust.

A lot of pros will be thinking "So why should I buy New MacPro if they're only going to let the line stagnate again?"

Apple said entire point of the redesign is to make the machine modular, so that it can be upgraded down the line, specifically addressing this concern. I guess it's up to each person to determine for themselves whether to believe it.

Modular so you can upgrade it only with Apple parts?

Well, if it was like the old pros, modular like: RAM, HD and Graphics cards could be upgraded.

CPUs as well

Have they ever limited upgrades to Apple parts on a machine before?

On pretty much every other product line, yes.

My Mac Mini's RAM says otherwise. Pretty sure that, for the vast majority of its history, the same goes for the iMac. And, obviously, the Mac Pro, even in its current iteration. What other product lines are you thinking of, aside from laptops?

The iMac only allowed RAM changing from what I know and it only had two slots. Changing the hard drive was a surgery that very few people are going to do. Apple is now in the habit of making the RAM and SSD part of the main board in the name of space saving.

OWC (https://www.macsales.com) made it pretty painless to upgrade an iMac's hard drive to an SSD. They sell a lot of kit for various machines. Just saying.

You are not wrong, but the article is clear that they were hamstrung by their silly trashcan design, and they are moving back to something more modular and updateable like the old Mac Pros, which should help avoid stagnation.

This is the key point... Apple will just let it stagnate again after this little flurry of activity.

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