Apple Mac Pro release date: Newly updated computer will not arrive until 2019

The company is being unusually open about what it is doing with its new, top-of-the-line computer

A new Apple Mac Pro on display during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2013 in San Francisco, California June 10, 2013 (REUTERS/Stephen Lam)

Apple won't release its long-awaited Mac Pro upgrade until 2019, it has said.

The current Mac Pro is easily Apple's most neglected computer. It was first released in 2013 – along with statements about how it was the result of great innovation – and hasn't received a single update since, despite the fact that Apple continues to sell it.

That has left much of the professional community waiting and wondering whether the computer would be receiving an upgrade or if it would be discontinued. Apple answered that question last year, when it gathered a range of journalists together for a panel and said it was working on a new, "modular" Mac Pro.

It said then only that the new computer wouldn't be released "this year", making clear it would be not be available in 2017. Some hoped that it would come in 2018, but Apple did not make any firm comment either way.

Now it has made clear in discussions with Techcrunch that the computer will not be coming this year. Instead, it will be pushed back into 2019, Apple said.

The company said that it had taken the entirely unusual decision to make the release date public before launch so that people could decide whether they should buy the existing iMac Pro or MacBook Pro, or wait for the new computer to come out. It is aware that people are not sure whether to wait and need to know more about the release schedule, it said.

The company is now working on the computer by talking to professionals – and even hiring them – to learn more about their workflow and incorporate that into the design of the computer, Techcrunch reported. While Apple didn't make clear how that will actually translate into what the computer looks like, it did say the work was "definitely influencing the architecture of where we’re going, what we’re planning for", the publication reported.

It also didn't reveal all that much about what the actual computer will look like when it arrives in 2019. But it is still working hard on making sure the computer is modular, it said, allowing users to swap out different parts of the system and distinguishing it from other pro hardware like the iMac and MacBook.

Apple has said that it has made an express decision to be more transparent about how it was working on the new Mac Pro.

"We recognize that they want to hear more from us. And so we want to communicate better with them," Apple's marketing head Phil Schiller said during the roundtable discussion last year.

"We want them to understand the importance they have for us, we want them to understand that we’re investing in new Macs — not only new MacBook Pros and iMacs but Mac Pros for them, we want them to know we are going to work on a display for a modular system."