Ben Evans
Liam ProvenApple's last tower topples… and the others will follow
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/27/apples_last_tower_topples/
Farewell, Mac Pro: Increasing integration means the end of expandable computers
<- by me on @theregister
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)I’d say that there’s another important change: external expansions are getting better. Things like eSATA mean that you can connect external disks without opening the case and get the same performance. Thunderbolt provides external PCIe equivalence. And most people would rather connect an external box than open the case.
mhd@david_chisnall @lproven @theregister But apart from the eGPUs, wouldn't that all have been true with FireWire, back in the olden days?
External disks, sure, but even FireWire 800 wasn’t as fast as SATA, so wouldn’t have been as good for SSDs. But, on the broader point, you’re correct. Indeed, 20 years ago, I was using two FW800 disks connected to a G4 PowerBook and basically stopped using my desktop as a result of all the expansion I needed being possible with a laptop.
@david_chisnall @lproven @theregister LaCie external drives of some kind were basically synonymous with a lot of Mac setups to a point where sometimes it's easier to tell the age of a photo by the design of the external drive than that of the Macbook/iMac…
But of course storage serves different needs, where backup or archives can be a lot slower than your workhorse ones. I can't say anything these days about the needs of the video/audio editors, and whether they'd prefer something even beefier than even the upgraded options you get with the current SBC Macs.
GPUs is something interesting, though. On the one hand, the Silicon chips are quite beefy there, on the other hand you're not just using it for pushing pixels to screens these days. But with the very high end or even multiples thereof for maths-based fairy tales, you'd be too big for the Mac Pro cases of recent years anyways.