It’s not hard to see why some users would prefer to upgrade the old “cheese grater” Macs rather than buying a 2013 system, and there’s even a Danish vendor, Big Little Frank, dedicated to reselling machines built around the older CPU platform. The question is, will this meaningfully benefit professional users - and can a third-party vendor beat the 2013 Mac Pro or the newer iMac Pro using Apple’s Mac Pro 5.1 from back in 2012? Five years later, third-party firms have taken it on themselves to offer the upgrades and capabilities Apple hasn’t added, and they’re using Apple’s older chassis to do it. While the new design and capabilities worked for some professional users, it failed to address the needs of others. The then-new systems emphasized multi-GPU configurations and offered a large number of Thunderbolt ports, but the diminutive form factor limited users to a single CPU socket and very little internal storage.
When Apple launched its redesigned Mac Pro in late 2013, it alienated a significant percentage of its professional user base.
