Like its predecessor, the 2019 Mac Pro also looks like nothing more than a giant box grater. The G5 design, with a front panel punched so full of holes that it was 65 percent aluminum and 35 percent air, was so logical for a computer packed full of hot, high-powered components that after a six year hiatus, Apple brought back a Mac Pro that is deeply inspired by the design of the original.
The Power Mac G5 design represented the high-end Mac tower for a decade, keeping its distinctive look outside while adapting and changing on the inside. In the early 2000s, colorful computers were for consumers and monochrome computers were for serious computer users. In the summer of 2003, Apple introduced an entirely new Mac tower, one that traded the cute colorful plastic of the Power Mac G3 and the more subdued gray and silver plastic of the Power Mac G4 for a more serious industrial design, clad in aluminum. Time and trends and Apple’s own predilections have led us to a world, two decades later, where the only Mac that fits these criteria starts at $6,000, but back then the desktop tower was the Mac. As defined by the standards of the 90s and early 2000s, these were real computers-boxes you could open up and swap hard drives, install RAM, stick in expansion cards, maybe even upgrade the processor itself. In this context, it’s easy to underestimate just how much importance the professional Mac tower had in the mind of the Mac world back in the day. And as for that consumer desktop, the G3 iMac was a wild success 1, but for years the real Mac users looked down on it as a weird, underpowered toy that wasn’t suited for getting real work done 2. There was no consumer laptop in Apple’s product line until the iBook was announced. After Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the late ’90s, he famously simplified the company’s product line by drawing a four-product grid: consumer desktop (the bulbous, brightly colored G3 iMac), consumer laptop (then, just an empty space), professional desktop (the Power Mac, first the blue-and-white G3 and then the G4), and professional laptop (the PowerBook).
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