Tower redesign

We're currently finishing work on a new design for the Mac Pro (née G5) tower. It's about due for a replacement, but not quite yet.

The previous tower case, starting with the blue and white G3 and ending with the mirrored door G4, went from early '99 to late '03. That's a span of about five years. The G5's aluminium case, a much more spacious design (especially now due to the Core CPUs where we have room to fit four hard drives and two optical drives), is into its fifth year ('03 to present and counting).

So, a change is imminent. We're not sure whether to change early or late this year - or whether we should keep this model going until next Jan. We don't really need to but at least we're ready if Steve gives the go-ahead.

Thought you might like to know: when we changed to the a-loo-minum tower from the polycarbonate G4 tower, some people said they preferred the 'squeaky clean' look of the latter. But after the new Xeon replaced the G5, we had all this free space (for more drives) and now even those who prefer the old tower are happier.

And I noticed that sometime after the G5 launched, Sun had released a tower similar in appearance to ours. I don't mind it at all but I still prefer ours. I think it's fine for others to copy us but it seems that few if any can actually improve on our stuff. I think it's because we think about things deeply, and this shows in not just the aesthetics but the functionality. And you can't just copy that.