On the eve of WWDC 2025, there’s a lot the Apple enthusiast community is downtrodden about. But I’d like to think about something different, and reminisce about my favorite WWDC in recent memory: WWDC ’19.
In the grand scheme of things this was a big WWDC event. Apple introduced some long-rumored new APIs, like Catalyst which allows you to build Mac apps against UIKit APIs. They also introduced the first version of SwiftUI, a long term bet which has reached a point of maturity that a decent number of apps are being written in SwiftUI to start.
But because I’m weird, WWDC ’19 is special to me because it’s the WWDC where the 2019 Mac Pro was announced.
The announcement of the 2019 Mac Pro was Apple’s love letter to the highest end pro Mac users, the people with the most demanding workflows who had been getting neglected by Apple for years now.
Apple appeared at this keynote and said “here’s a computer that compromises on nothing.”
The 2019 Mac Pro is still a beast to this day (in fact, I’m using it right now to draft this post). It’s fast (for a six year old computer). It’s super modular and upgradeable. And it’s a beautiful piece of kit. Like, seriously a great looking machine.
This Mac Pro featured the very best Xeon processors Intel had to offer in 2019, and although this machine easily gets lapped by pretty much the entire lineup of Apple Silicon computers now, these young whippersnappers should be reminded that even the cheaper 2019 Mac Pros can be upgraded (by the end user, no less) to a whopping 768 gigs of memory, and the higher end ones can take up to 1.5 terabytes of memory. Mind you, in 2025 Apple can’t sell you a computer with more than 512 gigs of memory.
The 2019 Mac Pro was the crown jewel of the Intel era of Macs, the absolute best Apple knew how to make with this architecture.
But more importantly, it was a redemption arc for Apple. For context: in 2019 Apple was still shipping mediocre MacBooks with that god awful butterfly keyboard that would have been their worst keyboard even if they had been super reliable (spoiler: they were terribly unreliable). Apple enthusiast podcasters lamented the state of the Mac, and people even wondered out loud if maybe Apple should bring back clones again, since it seemed like Apple had no interest in meeting Mac users’ needs.
The 2019 Mac Pro sent a (late) message to those customers that our concerns were heard, and that Apple was righting the ship.
And boy did they ever!
Later in 2019 Apple released a refreshed MacBook Pro that went back to the classic scissor switch keyboard and users rejoiced as the rest of the laptop lineup got the same treatment. Apple started making Macs with their own custom chips that performed amazingly well, and the first redesigned Apple Silicon MacBook Pros were a magnificent redesign. They got thicker and heavier but added back MagSafe and HDMI ports, and they offered insanely good battery life.
I still love my 2019 Mac Pro, and I will always think fondly of when I watched it get announced live while I sat in a parking lot of a hotel in Ashland, Oregon after checking out as I prepared to drive to San Francisco to start my job at GitHub the next day (where they gave me not just a butterfly keyboard MacBook Pro, but a generation-old one as my work computer that I had to suffer with for three years).
Right now Apple has a lot of issues, but Mac hardware is no longer one of them. I’ll be excited to tune into the keynote next week as always, but I still know in my heart that it won’t be a WWDC keynote that sits on par with 2019’s. That one was special.
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