Mac Pro (Late 2013)

A black cylinder, machined from one piece of aluminum and polished like a mirror. Everyone called it the trash can within about an hour. Apple built it around a triangular thermal core with one fan pulling air up through the middle, and filled it with Xeon E5 v2 processors up to 12 cores and two AMD FirePro graphics cards as standard. It was roughly an eighth the volume of the tower it replaced and nearly silent. Expansion moved outside entirely, onto Thunderbolt 2. That is where the argument started. Professionals who had relied on internal drive bays, their own choice of graphics card, or PCIe cards suddenly needed expensive external breakout chassis to do things that had been trivial. The second GPU was the deeper problem. Plenty of professional software had not been written for OpenCL or for balancing work across two cards, so it sat idle, and the small thermal core throttled under sustained load. Apple then left it alone for over three years. Video editors, 3D artists and scientists who had been the company's most committed desktop customers drew the obvious conclusion, and in 2017 Apple called a press roundtable to admit the design had not worked.