Five Years Ago Today, Apple's Uncharacteristic Apology Set the Stage for the Mac's Renaissance

The Mac lineup was in a bad state five years ago. The iMac, MacBook Air, and Mac mini had not received any updates over the course of three years.

A snapshot of the MacRumors Buyer's Guide.

Some users questioned whether Apple was still committed to the Mac at the high end of the market.

Apple apologized to pro Mac users in a meeting with a small group of reporters, and ensured that it remained committed to the Mac. In a rare and surprising move, Apple also pre-announced it was working on a completely rethought Mac Pro with a modular design, a new pro-level iMac, and a new pro display.

Five years ago today, the public was made aware of a meeting between Apple's former marketing chief Phil Schiller, software engineering chief Craig Federighi, and then-VP of hardware engineering John Ternus. The quotes that follow are from John Gruber's coverage of Daring Fireball.

Schiller apologized to Mac Pro users.

The current Mac Pro, as we've said a few times, was constrained thermally and it restricted our ability to upgrade it. And for that, we're sorry to disappoint customers who wanted that, and we've asked the team to go and re-architect and design something great for the future that those Mac Pro customers who want more expandability, more upgradability in the future. It'll meet more of those needs.

Federighi admitted that Apple had designed itself into a thermal corner.

I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will. We designed a system with the kind of GPUs that at the time we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two GPU architecture. That that was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But workloads didn’t materialize to fit that as broadly as we hoped.

Apple remains committed to the Mac.

We're committed to the Mac, we've got great talent on the Mac, both hardware and software, we've got great products planned for the future, and as far as our horizon line can see, the Mac is a core component of the things Apple delivers, including to our pro customers.

It's an understatement to say that Apple delivered. Not only did Apple release the modular Mac Pro and the iMac Pro, but it also finally dropped the problematic butterfly keyboard on MacBooks, brought back a wide array of ports on the latest MacBook Pro models, and gave customers an entirely.

The Mac's history will forever be changed by Apple's roundtable discussion with reporters.