A Flood of Fawning Reviews For Apple's Latest

Like many other review sites, it seems that MacWorld can hardly find enough good things to say about the new Mac Pro, even while conceding it's probably not right for many users. 9to5 Mac has assembled a lot of the early reviews, including The Verge's, which has one of the coolest shots of its nifty design, which stacks up well against the old Pro's nifty design. The reviews mostly boil down to this: If you're in a field where you already make use of a high-end Mac for tasks like video editing, the newest one lives up to its hype.

Comments

Advancing in what direction?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Hey guys, have you ever wanted to buy a workstation with half as many sockets and half as many DIMM slots as the prior generation? What if I remove all the capacity for internal expansion cards so that you can enjoy buying external cardcages? Still not sold? I've come up with the least rackable shape in the history of computing, you'll love it!

Re:Advancing in what direction?

[Kenja]

Advancing backwards. The new "Mac Pro" is just a "Mac Cube" version 2. I for one will not be buying one, which means my current Mac Pro is the last Macintosh I'll be getting. No internal drive bays, no expansion slots, not a professional computer. I would have to cover my desk with external devices to match what's in my current tower configuration.

Re:Advancing in what direction?

[CanHasDIY]

People aren't buying the old one. Apple's customers don't want the size.

So, Apple's typical customer cares more about aesthetic than usefulness?

10 years ago that would have been a solid burn (because it wasn't really true); today, when I take into consideration the people I know who tend to buy Apple products*, I'd say it's a far more true statement than ever before.

* Other than the handful of graphic designers and musicians, myself included.

Re:Advancing in what direction?

[Kenja]

More stuff goes into racks then just servers. Go into any audio studio, the Mac Pro will be in a rack. Same with video editing bays. But I guess Apple isn't interested in those markets anymore. Shame really...

Re:Advancing in what direction?

[Chas]

Rackable? It's a workstation not a server.

Internal expansion is the dirty past. Let it go. It's about as relevant electric drill attachments for sawing and sanding.

Yeah. Rackable. A lot of these types of machines are used by mobile production crews. With the 2010 MacPro you had to saw the handles off the case to get it to fit some sort of portable form factor (mobile racks). With this one, it's a step in the wrong direction. Sure, the BASE UNIT is quite hand-portable. But you then have to deal with all the peripheral devices that used to be able to mount inside a normal case.

Previously, you could simply drop your portable rack, pop the ends off, plug in power, a monitor and maybe network and go.
Now, you have to either hand-carry or unpack multiple devices just to get the same functionality.

Total memory is the significant metric, not the number of slots it fits into. And that's 12/16 GB vs 6/12GB for the older versions.

Sockets? The old Mac Pro didn't have any ThunderBolt sockets. This one has 6 ThunderBolt 2 sockets (supporting up to 36 devices).

It also has 4 USB 3 sockets (vs 5 USB 2 sockets on the old model.) Which presumably is the straw you're clutching.

Your complaints are without merit.

I think the term you're looking at is "desktop clutter". Being able to hook up umpty-jillion EXTERNAL devices is not a decent tradeoff for someone trying to get a nice, single-case solution.
I simply don't understand why Apple has such a hard on for their systems looking like an octopus.

I wish Apple would stop wasting time...

[maroberts]

...and produce a new 17"+ MacBook Pro with Retina display quality