On that Apple pro Mac Interview

link

1. What was obvious from the beginning.
2. What they should have done.
3. Their marketing approach.

1. The 2013 form factor is toast. IMHO it ought to be the basis for the next Mac Mini, because it's optimised for cuteness over throughout. Just make it smaller. This was kinda obvious from the moment they stuck THREE chips on ONE heatsink without liquid cooling.

They explain that they anticipated a broad adoption of use-cases where a dual-GPU would be handy, but scaling-out GPU workloads hasn't become popular (whoops) and scaling-up the workloads on single GPUs remains the norm. If you know how the memory hierarchy is managed in parallelised iterative computing applications (e.g. rendering pipelines, neural nets) it's kinda clear what they're saying.

2. They really could invert the triangle in the next iteration. Heatsinks need to bloom out from one side of a chip, but you can get away with a flat surface on the other. Now if you have multiple chip-sink blooms, back-to-back in a circle with the heatsinks all facing away from the centre, and then you can still preserve the cooling tower aesthetic, albeit with a much larger surface area for air to move over sinks.

I still wonder why they don't incorporate more basic jet/rocket engine design elements... compress the air in a chamber (#1) before it goes near chips, give #1 its own heatsinks, release air to the chip-sinks in chamber (#2) via a nozzle that forces rapid expansion and cooling of air. Basically, I'm wondering about the feasibility of stacking #1,#2 as a cooling tower over a cooling tower, if you will. Lol. Gotta read up more.

3.. "I think, as you talk about the pro user, the fact that our user base is split over notebooks, all-in-one desktops and modular desktops is important. We aren’t making one machine for pros. We’re making three different designs for pros."
Earlier in the article it is explained that the pro segment is defined by software application usage. Mac Pro just happens to be the compute-optimised solution for that segment.

I agree with this approach: customer segmentation is best approached as a multi-dimensional model. Product lines may then be articulated as points along a line in a specific dimension of segmentation. Like the vertical and horizontal matrices describing actors and roles in organisations, a business needs to have a product segmentation matrix which systematically addresses end user behaviours in multi-dimensional spaces.

4. Amid Trumpageddon, their speech patterns really do sound like Trump himself...