We all should understand the reasons why the Mac Pro remains in Apple’s product lineup, and will be there for several more years at least. Content creators and scientists demand state-of-the-art computing power and the maximum level of expandability. It may well be that only a few take advantage of the latter, but the former comes into play whenever heavy duty 3D rendering or mathematical calculations are called for.

Yes, the iMac with the quad-core processors can handle many of those CPU-heavy chores, but when you check the specs of a mainstream quad-core against an Intel Xeon, you’ll see vast differences in ultimate processing power. Maybe you don’t require that much horsepower, and I’ve come to realize that I don’t either, but tens of thousands of Mac Pro owners each quarter will continue to buy that box unless a better way can be found.

But the Mac Pro one humongous package, weighing just shy of 40 pounds in the usual configurations, plus the shipping box. It’s also huge, ungainly and some feel rather ugly, so I expect most users stick them under their desks. Certainly you don’t want to have to lug them around very often.

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You just know that the iPod had to be a failure. Why? Because the tech press and some alleged industry analysts said so over and over again, year after year. Every time another manufacturer came out with a competing product, it was dubbed the “iPod killer,” although those products soon faded from the scene. Certainly that was true with every version of the Microsoft Zune. After all, it was Microsoft. How could they build a product that wouldn’t take over a market?

This is not to say the Zune was and is necessarily a bad product. But something about it seems forced rather than a natural evolution of design, perhaps the consequence of using committees and PowerPoint presentations rather than depending on sheer human inspiration to build a new gadget.

Of course, the so-called experts didn’t realize that all of the digital media players before the iPod arrived actually never caught on in any meaningful way. They were all difficult to use, with obtuse interfaces from hell, and file downloads were agonizingly slow. Indeed, I reviewed a couple for an online publication and couldn’t find a single product I’d actually use for more than a minute or two after the review process was over — that is until the iPod arrived.

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Up until October of this year, the conventional wisdom such as it is had it that notebooks would soon supplant desktops in most homes and offices. The easy portability and the flexibility of having one computer that does virtually everything represents an extremely attractive proposition for everyone.

Indeed there have been theories, some I’ve expressed myself, that the entire desktop market would be restricted to content creators for whom no portable can provide the speed and expandability they need. That is the reason why Apple will likely include a Mac Pro in its lineup for a fair number of years, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the form factor was slimmed down substantially over the next few years.

I mean, do you really need all that extra bulk to house four hard drives, eight memory slots, and additional expansion slots? I’m certain Apple is busy devising ways to use the newer generations of Intel chips with reduced power and cooling needs to their best advantage in making it possible to actually carry a Mac Pro without suffering a back ache.

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In the old days of the Classic Mac OS, whenever something went wrong, the standard fix was to rebuild the desktop, check the hard drive with Apple’s disk repair application, and restart. That was the beginning and end of it, even if none of those remedies had anything to do with the problem.

Indeed, I once got involved in a heated exchange with a forum helper on AOL who kept repeating this silly mantra even for issues that could not possibly be repaired in this fashion.

Now the promise of Mac OS X was that its Unix foundation would rid Mac users of extension conflicts, desktop rebuilding and other irritating rituals and usher in a new era of speed and stability.

Well, the truth is that we didn’t get the speed at first, but stability was somewhat better, though never perfect. Applications would still crash, only the event would rarely force you to restart. There was no desktop to rebuild, but the world of Unix brought its own nasty complications, the most prominent of which is permissions.

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