We Hear You're Good at Computers

April 6, 2026·1 hr 42 min·5 clips

Jason Snell explains why Apple killing the Mac Pro was actually the right business decision — and probably should have happened in 2013.

Upgrade starts in familiar shape. Mike welcomes Jason back to a normal episode, then sends a Snell Talk question straight into Jason's space lane as Artemis 2 goes by the moon. Today is moon day. It lands with sincere delight, especially when Jason remembers Liftoff and the messages asking whether it might come back. Then the show turns. The Mac talk gets sharper as the hosts work through Apple's awkward relationship with the Mac and the promises it has made around it. The spreadsheet comes out. Apple is not walking away from powerful computers, the argument goes, but it is only making the powerful computers that suit its current taste. The Mac Pro sits there awkwardly. Jason connects the trash-can era and the later Mac Pro apology to a larger confusion about what the Mac was supposed to be. That is where the episode gets warm. He puts the Mac Pro roundtable near the butterfly keyboard as a symbol of a bad Apple period, not the same problem, but the same kind of bad smell. The route from Mac Pro to iMac Pro to Mac Studio now sounds like the cleaner path Apple probably should have taken. The apology feels stranger with distance. What once sounded reassuring to traditional high-end Mac users now sits badly beside Apple's actual direction. Apple silicon changes the frame. The hosts tie that recommitment to getting the Mac back up to spec, pulling operating systems closer together, and building compatibility layers with mixed results. Product names take their beating too. By the end, Logan's point about Apple's naming logic becomes both the joke and the thesis: there is logic, just not the logic people keep trying to force onto it.

As heard by us

A sharp Apple hardware postmortem on how the Mac Pro lingered past the strategy that once justified it.

Upgrade frames Apple's high-end Mac story as a messy correction that kept correcting itself. Mike Hurley and Jason Snell focus on the Mac Pro's strange afterlife, tracing the line from the trash can model through the iMac Pro and toward the Mac Studio, while arguing that Apple…

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Why you'd press play

Two hosts finally say the quiet part loud about Apple's most disastrous hardware era.

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