If you want to read why I say "begrudgingly," read my Ultimate Creative OS piece. Without a workstation-class Mac, I would have begrudgingly moved that stuff to Windows or Linux workstations. While an iMac would be fine for my DTP work, for 3D work I need multiple monitors, better GPUs, and more CPU cores than the iMac offers. Some slightly delusional people asserted that, if Apple only had iMacs, then pros would move to iMacs. It seemed like Apple just didn't care about the pros anymore and would be content to lose that blip of barely profitable market to HP, Dell, or smaller workstation makers like BOXX.įor many, the iMac suffices as a workstation for things like Photoshop, desktop publishing, etc. Many feared that Apple simply lost interest in a computer that made up increasingly little of the company's profit pie and demanded a lot of engineering resources. Software like Final Cut Pro X launched without support for legacy projects or other much-needed features. As Apple shifted focus to consumer-oriented products, a notoriously unsentimental and forward-looking Steve Jobs killed off high-end projects like the Shake video compositor and Xserve. Latest features and anticipation aside, many feared an update would never come to the Mac Pro. On one of the nights before the Mac Pro went live on the Apple store, my girlfriend said that I was configuring build-to-order parts for the machine aloud in my sleep. It's been over three years since Apple updated the guts with anything other than a CPU speed bump, and I (and plenty of others) have been yelling "shut up and take my money" at the Apple site for a while now.
But the contentious "Darth Pro" redesign has done what Apple wanted: created a fever-pitched chatter and air of excitement around the machine that their workstation competitors are surely envying. The buzz around a new Mac Pro would have been high even if Apple only updated the core of this machine with the newer tech like the Xeon E5 v2 CPUs, USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, PCI Express 3.0, etc. I might be a little fuzzy on the last one, but the others are definitely good indicators of how badly this machine needed a refresh.
For an idea of how much has changed since then: It's been over three years since we reviewed the last Mac Pro. To call Apple's Mac Pro "anticipated" definitely qualifies as an understatement. 3.0GHz 8-core Xeon E5-1680 v2 (Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz)ģ2GB 1866MHz ECC DDR3 (user-upgradeable, 64GB officially supported)Ĩ02.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0, dual gigabit EthernetĤx USB 3.0, 6x Thunderbolt, HDMI, headphone jack, line outĩ.9 inches high, 6.6 inches in diameter (251mm x 167mm)
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