The first reviews for the new Mac Pro are in, and users may be getting what they pay for with the revolutionary design and massive specifications of Apple’s latest Mac. With an unbelievable price tag of anything up to $14000, this is not a machine that will be seen gracing too many living-rooms, but for those earning their living from audio and video and where time is money, the early hands-on reviews suggest that the Mac Pro lives up to its promise. The new MAc Pro is indeed a beat of a machine, sporting 4 cores (upgrade-able to 12), up to 64 GB of Memory and the AMD FirePro GPU available with 2GB, 3GB, or 6GB of dedicated VRAM. This is one helluva monster!
Here’s what some of the early reviews are saying:
Small, fast and in a league of its own […]
The new Mac Pro is a serious improvement over the old model in every way, and is likely worth the upgrade. So, while $2,999 (let alone $10,000) is indeed a big investment, it’s well worth it for people who live and die by their workstation, and for whom (rendering) time is money.
There isn’t another computer we know of that’s this powerful and also this compact. With a starting price of $2,999, going all the way up to nearly $10,000, it’s quite pricey, but for videographers, photographers, animators and other creative professionals, it could be well worth the investment. – Endgadget
At long last, the pros get some love […]
Since FCP X was specifically optimized for the new Mac Pro, we tested our RED [4k] footage with the app and it handled native footage from the Epic shockingly well. For this test, I turned off auto-render and set the playback quality to “better performance.” I was able to layer four streams, resized and composed on top of each other with color correction on each clip, and FCP X played the composite back without stuttering or dropping frames […] If you enjoy using FCP X (which I truly, truly don’t), the Mac Pro is a fantastically responsive machine to edit on.
Addressing both GPUs makes for a huge improvement […] If you’re a Final Cut user, it’s remarkable […]
[If Adobe and other developers follow the FCP example,] the Pro could quickly turn from subtle speed bump to an actual rethinking of what desktop PCs do and what we can do with them. – The Verge
There’s a point to the Mac Pro’s new look – instead of using multiple fans and heat sinks to keep the Pro cool, Apple’s used a single fan and positioned the components around a single thermal core that distributes heat evenly. That means that the Mac Pro runs quiet – astonishingly so – though we did notice that it gets quite warm. The cooling system must be working overtime to keep those high-end components in check […]
We’ve put the computer through its paces with some real time 3D rendering, and the results are astonishing; complex scenes are rendered almost instantly, many of which would take several minutes on current high-end kits […]
For those who need the extra power, there’s nothing quite like the Mac Pro […] it feels like a glimpse at the future of the desktop PC – with a design so radical it’s hard to think of any other firm that would come up with it. – Stuff
Here’s the new round shape… pretty cool right?
Apple finally decided to give the Mac Pro’s some much needed love, but we just don’t see how this price tag will ever justify buying one of these beasts. Let us know in the comments if you have one, or plan to get one.