The new Mac Pro: will professionals embrace Apple's brave, expensive vision of the desktop?

The Verge by Nathan Ingraham

For photographers, designers, musicians, and video editors, Apple's musclebound machine is the $3,000 question

There’s no doubt that Apple’s brand-new Mac Pro is as much a statement as a computing tool. From its dramatic introduction at WWDC 2013 (marked by SVP Phil Schiller’s bravado) to its radically engineered internals, the Mac Pro is meant to remind the public that no other company designs or builds hardware quite like Apple. At $2,999 — $500 more than the outgoing model — its price is also a statement. It's a powerful, beautiful, aspirational computer that makes very little sense for the vast majority of the population. However, it's a computer Apple felt it had to make.

The question facing Apple now: is the Mac Pro still a computer that professionals in fields like photography, videography, and audio (once Apple’s bread-and-butter market) will feel compelled to buy? There are a few reasons it might be a tougher sell than before, starting with that $2,999 price tag. While a $500 increase for the base-model Mac Pro might be a drop in the bucket when you’re talking about buyers who rely and depend on these machines to make their living day in and day out, Apple’s new desktop will also ask potential users to rethink their notions about what exactly they need out of their professional machines.

APPLE IS ASKING PROFESSIONALS TO RETHINK WHAT EXACTLY THEY NEED FROM THEIR COMPUTERS

As we saw back in June, Apple flexed its design muscles and built a powerful computer that shows the company can still build hardware like none other on the planet. But that highly impressive design comes at a cost: Apple has significantly reduced the traditional expansion options in favor of a machine that more closely resembles the closed-off MacBook Pro with Retina display, a move that may alienate hardcore professionals who are accustomed to maximum expandability. There are only four RAM slots, and the system uses expensive flash storage — and the base model only comes with 256GB, a paltry amount for professionals pushing huge image, audio, and video files around. read more...