Q: Does anybody want a "Mac Pro Mini?"

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“For years, geeks have wanted Apple to make an ‘xMac’: an expandable desktop tower like the Mac Pro, but much cheaper, generally achieved in theory by using consumer-class CPUs and motherboards instead of Intel’s expensive, server-grade Xeon line,” Marco Arment blogs for Marco.org. “Apple’s refusal to release such a product is almost single-handedly responsible for the Hackintosh community.”

“Apple has shown that they don’t want to address this market, presumably because the margins are thin. And the demand probably isn’t as strong as geeks like to think: most businesses buy Windows PCs for their employees, and most consumers buy laptops for themselves,” Arment writes. “The relatively small group of people who still want desktopMacs seems to be served adequately by the iMac and Mac Mini.”

Arment writes, “The Mac Pro is all but forgotten now, but Dan Frakes restarted the discussion of the xMac this week, arguing for the next Mac Pro to be a consumer minitower: ‘Put all this together—Apple’s relentless efforts over the past few years to make everything smaller, cooler, and less power-hungry; the fact that you don’t need massive components to get good performance; and an apparent trend towards conceding the highest-end market—and it seems like a Mac minitower is a logical next step for the Mac Pro line.’ I don’t think it’ll happen like this.”