The most recent tower chassis is the Mac Pro 2019丨Unsplash
At the spring conference that just ended in the early hours of the morning, Apple unveiled its latest Mac Studio and Studio Display.
Mac Studio uses the latest M1 Ultra processor, connecting the two M1 Max together, breaking through the previous new performance ceiling, greatly surpassing the bulky and dense Mac Pro before the epidemic. The shape of the new computer is a small cube, a few centimeters thicker than the Mac Mini, evoking the memories of some senior fruit fans for the G4 Cube.
The latest release of Mac Studio and Studio Display丨 Apple official website
This isn't the first time Apple has tried to "bury" a tower chassis, but it's the most promising one.
The price of suffering
To make it clear what Apple and the Tower Chassis love and hate, we must first go back to the era when the personal computer was groundbreaking.
In 1984, Jobs introduced the Macintosh, Apple's first personal computer with a graphical interface.
Jobs and Macintosh丨wikipedia
Jobs's idea was simple: Computers in the past were so "complex" that users needed to enter command lines and program them manually to use them. Macintosh is different, all functions appear in graphical icons, menus, buttons, greatly reducing the threshold for learning.
Since the Macintosh is a computer that focuses on "simplicity", it should also be as simple as possible in appearance, preferably like the appliance that has long been popular in the United States - television.
So, the first generation of macintosh, in today's terms, was an "all-in-one machine."
Of course, at that time, there was no concept of "all-in-one machine" and "split machine", and there was no standardized size of motherboards, chips and other parts, if you want to build a computer, you must purchase your own parts, and then weld them together.
But all the potential problems behind this, including compatibility, power consumption, and heat dissipation, also need to be solved by yourself. The early personal computers were all built this way.
Macintosh prototype in the Computer History Museum 丨 wikipedia
Not surprisingly, the Macintosh team led by Jobs greatly underestimated the negative problems of the "all-in-one" solution of that year. Because the Macintosh has no fans, plus the picture tube of the screen, and the motherboard, all squeezed into such a small box, there is a serious heat dissipation problem.
Soon after going public, the Macintosh suffered a Waterloo, which eventually led to Jobs being kicked out of Apple. Although "cooling" was just one of Macintosh's many problems, later companies, including Apple itself, learned from it.
The tower chassis came into being.
Before the tower chassis, the personal computer had two "forms". One is more extreme, what Jobs wanted, "all-in-one", and he was basically the only one in the whole of Silicon Valley. The other is the "desktop" of the monitor stacked on the chassis.
Power Macintosh 7100 desktop (horizontal) chassis 丨wikipedia
The tower chassis was born to cope with the rapid growth of computer performance, power consumption, and an increasingly rich set of functional modules, and people needed larger motherboards and larger chassis that could accommodate it.
It's a good idea to stand the chassis up, stand next to the monitor, or place it directly under the table. It gives computers more space, "able to cram" chips that consume as much power as beasts of prey, ensuring that they can dissipate heat normally.
But for Apple and Jobs, the tower chassis is, after all, a painful price and a reluctant compromise.
Retrofit the tower chassis
After the big failure of the original Macintosh, both Apple and Jobs had to "compromise."
On Apple's side, they first adopted a "split desktop" design with a monitor pad on the chassis on the 2nd generation Macintosh. In the early 1990s, they worked with IBM and Motorola to develop the Power Macintosh and adopted a tower chassis on the highest-end and most powerful 8100 model.
The first Power Macintosh 丨wikipedia
Jobs, for his part, founded NeXT Computers after leaving Apple. Also in the early 1990s, Jobs released the NeXT computer with a "split" design.
The chassis of a NeXT computer is like a tower, but it's hard to say it's a tower because it's not tall enough, but more like a kind of "square." This "square" design will play a more important role in future history.
NeXT's block chassis 丨wikipedia
Neither the Power Macintosh nor the NeXT have been successful in the market, and the reasons behind it are complex, but at least, with the tower chassis, they no longer have heat dissipation problems.
In 1997, Jobs returned to the near-bankruptcy Apple, and the loser and the loser met and began a redemption.
Facts have proved that Jobs's "persistence" at that time was actually right.
As a "product designer", Jobs has been pursuing a lifelong pursuit of making products thinner, smaller and more integrated. It was this persistence that allowed Apple to bottom out in 1998.
Jobs, along with Jony Ive, the designer he dug into, launched one product after another, good-looking and easy-to-use products: from the iMac G3, which is a spiritual replica of the original Macintosh, to the smaller and smaller iPods of a generation, the MacBook Air that can fit into envelopes, and the iPhone that has revolutionized the world.
The once stunning iMac G3丨wikipedia
In the process, Jobs never gave up his obsession with "burying" the tower chassis, and has been trying to improve it.
For example, the Power Mac G4 Cube released in 2000 is the first time jobs brought the design concept of "squares" back to Apple.
At that time, the Power Mac G4 Cube was much smaller than the G4 of the tower chassis, but it was also more limited in terms of functional scalability. Finally, G4 Cube is criticized by users as "not worthy of the name of Power Mac" because of the lack of scalability of storage and the heat dissipation problem caused by the shrinking volume.
Inherited from the NeXT block chassis, the G4 Cube丨wikipedia
Later, whether it is a Mac mini or a "trash can" Mac Pro, Jobs did not shy away from his ideal of "getting rid of the tower chassis", hoping to provide a more elegant packaging solution for desktop computers, but every time, the answer was not perfect.
The small and elegant Mac mini does not represent the peak of Mac performance; and the Mac Pro released in 2013, which looks like a "trash can", in order to reduce the size, adopts a subtle "dual motherboard design", but in the end, it is still like every similar attempt in the past, in the heat dissipation, performance performance, there is a problem, once again by the user "bad evaluation" treatment.
The mixed reputation of the "trash can" 丨 wikipedia
Jobs tried again and again to "miniaturize" the tower chassis, and after a short attempt, with the improvement of chip performance and power consumption, he finally could not escape the "curse" of the tower chassis in any way.
From the Power Mac G4 to the G5, to 2019, the latest generation of Mac Pro. Apple had to re-enable the "tower chassis" after the failure of miniaturization again and again, and Jony Ive also did its best to polish the design and process of the "tower chassis" to an extreme.
Of course, the price is also very extreme.
Bulky and frightening performance monster 丨Unsplash
The dawn of success
Jobs and Jony Ive, who have been busy for half a lifetime, try to solve the problem that the tower chassis is not "elegant" enough in a "product design" way.
But what really gave Apple the hope of "killing" the tower chassis was another chip expert who didn't understand industrial design, Johny Srouji.
Since joining Apple in 2008, Johny Srouji has been leading the development of Apple chips, personally bringing Apple into a new era of fully developed chips.
Apple's M1 Max chip丨wikipedia
Under Srouji's leadership, one of the biggest features of Apple's self-developed chips is "high integration." Apple has encapsulated the three major pieces of CPU, GPU, and memory inside the chip, which greatly increases the running efficiency. The M1 full family of chips has very low power consumption in the same performance compared to the traditional X86 platform.
Another benefit of this is that the size of the computer's motherboard can also be greatly reduced. Remember the original reasons for the birth of the tower chassis in the 80s? It is to fit a larger motherboard.
But Apple no longer needs a big motherboard. Comparing Mac Studio with the Mac Pro released in 2019, it is not difficult to find that Apple has integrated the huge graphics cards, memory, and Afterburner video acceleration cards mentioned in the Mac Pro into the M1 Max/Ultra.
Even for those professional PC gamers, the large chassis has been given more decorative significance丨Unsplash
With this improvement, the maximum power required for Mac Studio is only 370W, which is less than a fraction of the Mac Pro 1400W power supply.
At the end of the conference, despite Apple's announcement, the Mac Pro was not "hacked." But in any case, the next generation of Mac Pro with self-developed chips will no longer need a chassis as large as before to accommodate many parts.
No matter how fierce the performance, it will be encapsulated in a small chip. The ultimate technology and persistent design have come together once again.
Written by Jesse
EDIT: Sleeper
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