Requiem for the iMac Pro, the ultimate Intel Mac (Macworld/Jason Snell)
Maybe someday there will be a tell-all book written by someone inside Apple during the 2010s. Maybe we will eventually know exactly what happened that led to a bit of a lost decade for the Mac, one that will be remembered for a failed attempt to rethink the Mac Pro and a series of questionable hardware decisions that hobbled Mac laptops for years.
But until then, we’re mostly left to speculate about what happened—and how Apple turned it around, ushering in a new decade that’s got the potential to reinvigorate the Mac in a way not seen since the early days of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple.
But in my opinion, there’s a single Mac model that tells a good portion of the story all on its own. It’s a Mac that was a remarkably good computer on its own, but also one that represented an approach to the Mac that Apple itself would end up repudiating.
Pour one out for one of the best Macs of the 2010s, and perhaps the one that best represents that confused decade. The iMac Pro is dead—but it lived fast and left an exquisite corpse.
