• It won't happen. The trashcan Pro was kind-of that... a compact compute box with no user upgradeable parts built for an age of expansion boxes and multi GPUs that never came.

    Imagine all the cables if they did this with the mini... Power supplies for each tier plus thunderbolt. If you had three pieces, it would get ridiculous.

    Realistically, they need to just bring back a revised, standard tower. Loads of SATA and m.2 slots, as many Xeons as they can cram in, tons of RAM and lots of space for full-length cards.

    They can still cover the thing in thunderbolt ports if they think that's what people want.

    I almost think they redesigned the Mac Pro to take up less shipping space... The boxes for the cheesegraters were about the size of a fridge.
    If they based a new tower on 2.5" drives instead of 3.5, then they could make the thing quite small and light yet still have plenty of space for PCI-E and airflow.

    Maybe the Mini will get Covfefe Lake and a price increase.

  • I know, it prob wont.... but...

    Imagine if they had a clever way of hiding connections? And power could go via the connection so you'd only need one PSU/Power cable. Think a tower half way between the Mac mini and Mac Pro, with the GPU being the additional bit, maybe thats not quite right either, but im not sure they will go fully modular.

    The problem with the current Mac Pro is the GPU's, Apple took a gamble of workflows favouring dual GPU's, GPU makes decided to go single big hot hungry GPU route (hence SLI being less of a thing). The thermal design of the current MP didn't allow for such GPUS...

  • They could come up with a new connector for thunderbolt plus enough power for a GTX 1080. Not sure if those are two things you'd want in the same cable... The main roadblock to elegance in a truly modular system is power requirements. The big ol' towers had 1000 watt PSUs that took up almost a quarter of the useable volume.

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