Dear Apple: Just give me an empty box
It’s been three years since the cylinder Mac Pro came out and its been an unceremonious flop compared to the tried and true cheese grater Mac Pro. The previous device was beloved for its Mac style, practical design, and expandability. Honestly, while the first Mac that I used was a Mac Mini in our computer lab in high school, the school’s singular Mac Pro that they had donated to them was one of the reasons I switched to the Mac. I grew up building my own PCs out of scrap parts from school and used it as our machine for robotics in high school. My senior year fell in love with MacOS at the time because of the iLife and iWork suite making multimedia and creative pursuits much easier for a layperson such as myself. This was at the time of Window Vista where Windows had become bloated and complex to use and I really loved how much more straightforward the Mac was with multimedia. I did not have to fight with drivers or codecs like I did with Windows. Being able to do stuff at the time like just plug in a printer it and it work without having to get on a dial-up modem and download 300MB of drivers was amazing to me.
I was blown away by the “It just works” nature of OS-X at the time and the thoughtful design of the professional-level 17" MacBook Pro my teacher used and the school Mac Pro. I did everything I could to get a basic white Macbook for college, but what I really aspired to was the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro hardware. I had never seen a screen loo as good as the Apple Cinema Display and I was blown away with how clean and efficient the Mac Pro was in terms of changing hard drives out without having to fuss with SATA and power cables. The Mac Pro was a combination of thoughtful design and practicality and I loved it.
In the intervening years I have grown into using my own MacBook Pro at work and eventually bought my own iMac at home. I bought the iMac because I wanted a bigger screen and something with ports that I didn’t have to unplug and plug my stuff into every time I came and went with my computer. The iMac is a wonderful machine, but as somebody who grew up building PCs what I really want from Apple is a modular Mac like the old Mac Pro. Apparently in 2018 we will be getting said machine and no doubt its going to be expensive, like $3000–10,000 expensive without a monitor (And of course I’ll want to get an Apple monitor), but what I really want is an empty metal box with MacOS rights.
What I’m proposing is Apple release an enthusiast-version of the next Mac Pro targeted at both home-enthusiasts and maybe the education market. I would pay $500 for an empty box with licensing rights to MacOS for anything that I shove into that box. I think it would be fair to not offer AppleCare for it, but I would love the ability to have a Mac Pro and buy my own parts for it so that I could get into the professional Mac ecosystem. Real professionals can buy a supported machine for the “it just works” factor, but I think there would be a small, but dedicated market of people what would love to build their own Macs with off the shelf parts and run MacOS on it even if it was more work than pulling it out of the box. I think this would be a great way to bring the Hackintosh enthusiasts into the fold. $500 and being tied to a physical box would prevent people from slapping MacOS onto any box and pirating it and it would lower the barrier to entry for the Mac. I don’t know what such a machine would look like and I know that Apple would never sell us an empty box, but a geek can dream. I’d stand in line for that.
Not because the iMac is not enough for what I need it to do, but just because I still have a soft spot for building my own computers. It’s a lot of research and work, but as a computer geek it is something I really enjoy doing. Yeah, I could do that with Windows, but I love the Mac and I want to stick with that now.
