Apple · Mac Pro ·Jun 04, 2019

Apple announces new Mac Pro - FINALLY! Everything you always wanted - at a price.

By Gary Bettan

I honestly thought all the talk of a new Mac Pro was just B.S. from Cupertino. I've been posting April Fools blog posts about it for years. I did not expect to ever see the new "modular" Mac Pro. Well I'll be damned - they did it!

This sounds more like an Apple dedicated HP workstation - Down to the Thunderbolt 3 daughter card. But it looks promising. Proof will be in the pudding. I'm curious to see just what kind of machine can be configured for $10K. I think the cost are going to be closer to $15K to get the level of hardware editors really want. But make no mistak about it - you will be bale to get the kind of powerful Mac Pro you've been dreaming of for years.

Of course it is expensive. The Mac OS tax is pretty high. We offer a custom configured HP Z4 workstation for $1,000 less then the base Mac Pro. With 8-core Xeon. 32 GB RAM, Quadro P2000 GPU and 512 SSD boot drive.

The bottom line is that the new Mac Pro hits every checkbox that Mac based creatives want:

1) Expandable & Flexible
2) Comparable CPU & RAM options to curretn Dell/HP workstations
3) Better GPU options - but not Nvidia
4) Mac OS
5) Tons of I/O and Slots
6) As powerful and fast as you can afford

The only real short coming (besides price) that I see is the lack of Nvidia GPU support. Like it or not, many content creation tools like Premiere Pro, After Effects and Resolve leverage the hell out of Nvidia's CUDA technology.

The Apple "Afterburner" GPU card is their answer to this and it may just be better than CUDA for playing back RED and other 8K formats. But I highly doubt it will come anywhere close to the price / performance of Nvidia cards. If Adobe, Avid & BMD optimize their software for the new "Afterburner" technology, it's going to give Nvidia a run for their money, even at a cost premium vs a Quadro card.

As a PC guy I say Meh, as a Content creator I say cool, as a Mac based editor I say Yay!

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