• The new Mac Pro that Apple unveiled on Monday resembles its earlier professional desktop computers.

• The design of the new machine is a tacit acknowledgement of the magnitude of one of Apple’s biggest design mistakes in its history: the much-maligned “trash-can” Mac Pro computer.

• The new model fixes the biggest problem of the trash-can version – its lack of expandability.

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On Monday, Apple CEO Tim Cook and company acknowledged just how big a blunder they made with the last version of the company’s professional desktop computer.

The new Mac Pro that Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, unveiled at the company’s annual developer conference in San Jose, California, looked awfully familiar to anyone who has followed the company’s line of professional computers over the years. The computer’s metal rectangular case, its handles, and its easy expandability are reminiscent of the professional desktop computers Apple sold for more than decade before debuting the model critics derided as a trash can in 2013. Even the new Mac Pro’s cheese-grater-like air vents look like more of an iteration than a complete rethinking of those found in the earlier computers.

In other words, to finally bring its flagship Mac into the future, Apple went back to its past, tacitly admitting that its last design was a complete and utter dead end.

The admission has been a long time coming. When Apple unveiled the trash-can Mac Pro at its developer conference six years ago, Phil Schiller, the company’s head of marketing, touted it as a prime example of how the company could still make breakthrough products despite a growing chorus of criticism that the iPhone maker was simply riding on its past success.

“Can’t innovate, my ass,” he declared to a delighted crowd.

Source: businessinsider