Top 10 Mac Pro Tips from Launch Day

Apple was in New York yesterday to officially launch its Mac Pro hardware. We were fortunate enough to get one of the units into the hands of a cutting-edge production facility in town, who will be putting the hardware through its paces, along with the latest version of Final Cut Pro, for a forthcoming StudioDaily review. In the meantime, there are plenty of places you can go on the net to see benchmarks, system specifications, and other information about the new system, but we thought it would be worth highlighting the most useful nuggets of information we got from Apple representatives yesterday.

1) The Mac Pro makes 4K monitoring easy. Just send a signal out via HDMI to a second 4K monitor and you're good to go. For color-critical applications, you'll want a device like the AJA Io 4K or the Blackmagic UltraStudio 4K, which will get you 10-bit video monitoring over Thunderbolt.

2) Only one PCIe-based Flash drive is supported. Why? Every other PCIe lane in the system architecture is in use. If you need more than 1 TB of storage, it probably makes sense to connect a separate RAID device anyway.

3) Thunderbolt 2 cables will be available at up to 60 meters in length. That means you can stash that separate RAID device — or anything else that's so noisy or bulky that you don't really want it on your desktop — in a separate room but still access it at crazy fast speeds. read more...