The “New” Mac Pro. Design vs. Practicality.

By Walter Biscardi

When I first saw the new Mac Pro announced it reminded me of one thing. The Cube.

The Cube was a “revolutionary machine,” putting a lot of power into a small, and very quiet space on your desktop. It was a flop however because it just wasn’t very practical. It was overpriced for what you got and it wasn’t very user upgradeable friendly. Apple appeared to put design ahead of practicality.

Now after just returning from the NAB Show 2014 and having the opportunity to not only see the new Mac Pro, but also play with them, my feeling is Apple has done it again. Created something for design first, practicality second. Consider who the Mac Pro is really designed for. It has it in its name. ”Pro.” The casual desktop user is not going to buy this machine, they would purchase the extremely capable and quite powerful iMac. If that’s too much, there’s the very capable Mini and of course the awesome MacBook Pro and Air laptops.

The Mac Pro simply exists for the “Pro” users out there who need the most power they can get from a desktop computer. Generally Pros also want to get the most life they can get out of any purchase. With traditional desktop computers, including the previous generation Mac Pro, this was pretty easy by simply upgrading internal components. With today’s applications, that generally means adding RAM, adding a more powerful graphics card and adding the latest SSD drives to keep older machines useful and current. I still have 2009 and 2010 Mac Pros operating everyday in our shop humming right along with the latest Adobe Premiere Pro CC because we’ve updated the graphics cards. Taking some advice from folks at NAB, I’m going to add an SSD to all of them as well to get even more life out of them. read more...