MacUser and others reported yesterday that the Mac Pro will no longer be sold in EU countries as of March 1. This is because the unit no longer complies with an EU regulation. Beyond all shadow of doubt, this shows the Mac Pro in its current form is dead. If it wasn’t, Apple wouldn’t abandon sales across Europe—it would update the unit. (Can you imagine Apple saying “we’re no longer selling iMacs in Europe as of March1”? No, neither can I.)

So what does this mean for the future? As per the linked piece, Apple CEO Tim Cook reassured a customer via email that Apple was “working on something really great for later next year” in the pro space, although whether that means the Pro space (as in Mac Pro) remains to be seen. When you look at Apple’s earnings, the Mac is now very much the minority platform compared to iOS. And when Apple breaks down sales of Macs, desktops are the minority share there, outnumbered by MacBooks. Within desktops, iMacs and Mac minis reportedly sell far in excess of Mac Pros. The Mac Pro is a niche within a niche within a niche, in a market—PCs—that also happens to be in decline.

Additionally, when you examine the rest of Apple’s range, the Mac Pro stands out like a sore thumb. It’s big and the units I’ve used and seen have a tendency to be quite noisy. It still looks quite nice, but also resembles the product of a bygone age. Apple’s laptops and desktops increasingly move towards appliance-like form-factors. Bar adding some extra RAM to the high-end iMac, they’re now sealed units, more resembling an iPad in that sense than a Mac of old. It’s therefore hard to see where a Mac Pro fits with today’s Apple and what a Mac Pro successor might be.

Developer Andrew Till responded to me on Twitter about this subject earlier today:

It’s what the Pro represents that’s most important. I use an iMac but I’d really worry about Apple’s direction if Pro died.

But what does the Pro represent? That Apple is still keen to embrace a high-end pro market, but not keen enough that it bothers to update its flagship ‘huge PC’ with any frequency? That it still cares for the top-tier of the pro market, when evidence suggests Apple’s far more interested in the next rung down: those pros who happily use an iMac (albeit, perhaps, one with a ton of RAM) or a Mac laptop to do their work. Perhaps in the same way Apple broke from its past with iOS, it’s time for it to break from its past in computing—from the time of the tinkerer and the Apple II.

Cook doesn’t seem to be the kind of person to lie, and so Apple must be working on something to address a pro market, and it’s going to be very interesting to see what’s revealed—especially for European pros who can’t or won’t work with other Macs, and who’ll be champing at the bit by that point. But I’d say it’s almost inconceivable that come WWDC, Apple will just unveil another tower, essentially mirroring its predecessor.

I don’t know, and neither does any other tech journo. Anyone who claims otherwise, unnamed sources or otherwise, is a lying git.

Yesterday, Apple announced the 128 GB iPad 4. I reckon it’s a good idea, giving those who need it extra storage capacity. In my post, I noted that Apple was (not necessarily intentionally) promoting a culture of discarding digital media, purely on the basis of how little heavy users could keep on a device. Although music, movies and TV are increasingly well catered for by the cloud, other content isn’t. Magazines can often (although not always) be redownloaded, but doing so is slow and could impact on capped broadband allocations; anyway, the advantage of digital is having a collection you can rapidly search, which is no good if most of the items aren’t immediately accessible. Elsewhere, apps and games continue to mushroom in size, due to devs doing increasingly complex things on iOS and also the demands of the Retina display. Years back, I thought iOS games approaching 500 MB were going a bit far; now, it’s relatively commonplace for titles to unpack to well over 1 GB. If you’re a keen gamer, you won’t just have one or two such titles on your device—you’ll have dozens, and you’ll be forced to delete some—including all your progress, unless you’ve manually backed it up.

What’s amazing is how few tech journalists get any of this. Tap! magazine deputy editor noted on Twitter that many of them are now making comparisons between the most expensive iPad option (the 3G 128 GB version) and the cheapest MacBook Air (which, note, lacks 3G):

If I am looking at the top-end iPad, then I’m clearly seriously in the market for an iPad. Switching to an entry-level PC won’t tempt me. “If you’re spending $800 dollars, why not spend $200 more?” …on something twice the weight that runs different apps on a non-Retina screen

It’s also extremely clear from some of those criticising Apple’s decision that they don’t use iOS all that much, presumably having dismissed it as a toy, unfit for any ‘real’ work (countered, of course, by the many companies now using iPads for real work in medicine, design, music, and so on). Bolton continued:

In one article, the author says they can kind of understand if you have loads of music or movies. Apps and games completely ignored. Lots of tech writers seem not to care about how people who actually use devices think, only about how the internet responds to announcements.

A big chunk of the tech journalism (and I use that word loosely) industry has yet to enact a much-demanded New Year’s resolution of thinking before typing, rather than just spewing their own opinion into your eyes as fact. Just because something isn’t for you, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s pointless or stupid, nor does it mean those considering buying it are crazy. To my mind, with the iPad increasingly used by all manner of professionals and consumers alike, it would have been inconceivable had Apple not bowed to the inevitable and offered a larger capacity. But then I actually use iPads rather than just write about them.

Marco Arment has an interesting idea about storage capacities:

[S]torage capacities referenced or implied1 in the names or advertisements for personal computers, tablets, and smartphones should not exceed the amount of space available for end-user installation of third-party2 applications and data, after enough software has been installed to enable all commonly advertised functionality.

With the 64 GB Surface Pro only having 23 GB of free space for anyone to actually use (The Verge), Arment’s bang-on with this. It’s annoying enough when you buy an iPad and realise iOS has ronched about 4 GB of space, but it’s insane that you can now buy a unit and find well over half the storage space taken up by the operating system and some bundled apps. At best, it’s misleading; at worst, it’s outright deception. It’d be interesting to see what would happen if people complained to local advertising standards watchdogs about this.

Apple’s announced the iPad 4 (or, as it calls it, primarily to annoy copy editors the world over, the ‘iPad with Retina Display’) is to now include a 128 GB model. Predictably, there are already people moaning about this for various reasons, not least the inevitable price-hike over the 64 GB model, and that wonderful non-reason “I don’t need it and so I don’t see why anyone else would”, but I’m happy to see Apple acknowledge that at least some iPad owners need more storage space.

A 128 GB model isn’t for everyone, of course, but I’m increasingly seeing games (especially complex ones with Retina assets) clock in at well over 1 GB and individual issues of magazines sized at anything between 250 MB and 1 GB. Although Apple’s making reasonable efforts to provide on-demand access to your media content (iTunes Match enables you to access your music without keeping it all on your device, and TV shows and movies bought in certain iTunes Stores can be streamed rather than downloaded), it’s not enough. Until every piece of content you buy is stored securely in the cloud and internet access is so fast and unrestricted that you wouldn’t think twice about redownloading a 1 GB magazine and data for apps or games isn’t obliterated when you delete one, we’re increasingly going to need more capacity on tablets, not less.

Here’s hoping Apple follows this up with a 128 GB iPhone (despite the eye-watering price-tag that will then command) and a 128 GB iPod touch. As it stands, the new iPad model is a good start. I’d been wondering if Apple was beginning to promote a culture of disposal rather than collection on iOS, forced on users because of the lack of storage. Magazines, apps and games would have to fall by the wayside, simply due to devices filling up so fast. A larger iPad means this won’t be the case—at least not so quickly—for those lucky enough to own one.