This is it. The moment professionals have been waiting for. Did Apple finally realize that the Mac Pro is supposed to be a professional device, not some appliance? Did they return the Mac Pro to its former glory, before the “trash can” redesign? Are we back to cheese grater Macs? Yes! To everything, yes! The new Mac is a cheese grater, rejoice!
Okay, for those who are thinking, “Okay, why is it exciting to have a cheese grater Mac,” we have to look back at previous professional Macs.
The Power Mac Era
After Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, Apple got to work simplifying their lineup. Products would fit into one of four categories, which he laid out on a 2×2 grid. Professional desktops, professional portables, consumer desktops, and consumer portables. Apple had the infamous iMac G3, the little blue bubble of computational delight for consumers. There was the clam shell shaped iBook as well, styled in similarly colorful plastic. Then there was the Powerbook professional laptop and the Power Mac G3 for pros. There was a boring beige model and a colorful blue and white model. That blue and white model would define professional Apple desktops for nearly two decades.
The Power Mac G3 (Blue and White) via Apple Museum.
The Power Mac G3 had a large, symmetrical shape. The top had curved plastic handles and the bottom had curved plastic arches that the entire body sat atop of. It was a masterpiece. An easily serviceable, easily upgradable Mac. It had the guts and style of a Mac, with the simple internal layout of a PC. The Power Mac G4 used the same basic design, though with a Power PC G4 processor and a slightly different blue color. Fun fact, I actually bought an old Power Mac G4 in college to tinker with, and turned it into a relatively decent gaming rig for 2007.
Then the Power Mac G5 came along. This is when Apple first introduced a “cheese grater” Mac. Besides the iconic perforations in the front of the case, it looked like a metal version of the Power Mac G3 and Power Mac G4 that came before it. Metal handles, large interior space, easy to upgrade and maintain.
Intel
In 2006, Apple switched to Intel processors. This was a huge shift for the company. Their products still set themselves apart from their PC counterparts with great design, reliability, and the power of macOS. The Mac Pro replaced the Power Mac G5, with little external improvements. That design lasted 7 years. Then Apple made a massive mistake.
In 2013, Apple released the “Trash Can” Mac Pro. It was cylindrical, small, impossible to maintain or upgrade, and it looked like a high-end trash can. That was fitting, it was trash. It was an art piece made by someone who didn’t understand what professionals wanted from a computer. This is when professional Mac users really began to suffer. It went without upgrades because Apple couldn’t figure out how to add new components to its architecture. Professionals began moving back to PCs. Apple promised a solution. They released the iMac Pro to help slow the wave of pro users leaving the platform, and promised a new Mac Pro with modular features and upgradability, like the old times. But by now, pros were leery of Apple.
Introducing: The 2019 Mac Pro
This past week, Apple came through. They revealed the new Mac Pro, and, once again, it’s a cheese grater. Finally, we’re getting what we want from Apple.
The new Mac Pro has a new grille design for improved airflow, making it look more like a cheese grater than ever before. But that’s not all. Lift the enclosure off, and you have a steel frame built around a highly upgradable and maintainable computer.
The design is centered around fantastic air flow and expandability. It has incredible power, but is only as loud as a MacBook Pro, even at its loudest. Each compartment is designed to bring air flow to the components underneath, reducing the need for individual component fans.
The Specs
The design is great. But like all great pro designs, its most important feature is getting out of the way. More importantly, what kind of power is the Mac Pro packing?
Sit down, this is a little crazy.
- Processor: Up to 28 core Xeon Processors with 64 PCI express lanes.
- Memory: Up to 1.5TB 1.5TB! That’s 1,500GB! Really! For reference, my MacBook Pro has a respectable 32GB. That’s 2% of what this machine can handle. 2%! I play games, edit videos, edit photos, and write code on this machine! I keep three monitors running at all times! That’s with 32GB. For most people, 16Gb is enough and 32Gb is plenty. 1,500GB? That’s insane!
- Graphics: Up to 4 AMD Radeon Pro Vega II cards using new MPX Modules to allow users to run two dual AMD Radeon Pro Vega II cards. Up to an unfathomable 56 teraflops of graphics performance and 128GB of video memory. That’s on top of the maximum 1.5TB machine memory!
- Apple Afterburner: 6.3 billion pixels per second ASIC accelerator card for videos. Decode up to three streams of 8K ProRes RAW video and 12 streams of 4K ProRes RAW video in real time. It’s a card with a single purpose, and because of that, it’s unbelievably fast and useful for any professional video editor.
- Eight PCI Express expansion slots, twice as much as the old Mac Pro tower, for extreme exapandability
To put all of this into perspective, the new Mac Pro is a Bugatti Chiron while everyone else has been content driving around in Mustangs. It is an unfathomably powerful processing beast. There are PCs like this on the market. You can buy a workstation like this elsewhere. But nothing really combines all these features into one package like the new Mac Pro does.
Perspective
Okay, car comparisons aren’t the best way to put this into perspective. Let’s instead look at Apple’s comparisons to previous Apple hardware. Using a few professional applications, Apple measured the improvement of performance between the old Mac Pro, the new iMac Pro, and the new Mac Pro. To clarify this, remember that the iMac Pro is an extremely powerful machine, as was the 12 core Mac Pro, in its prime.
Keeping in mind the fact that the previous 12-core Mac Pro and 18-core iMac Pro are already performance beasts, the new Mac Pro is unthinkably fast. A build that took ten minutes before would now take two and a half minutes. That’s an incredible leap forward.
The MPX Module and Graphics
Apple introduced a new Mac Pro Expansion Module, the MPX Module. The MPX module takes a standard PCI Express connector, then adds additional PCIe lanes. This allows the graphics card to perform faster, as well as integrate Thunderbolt. Each MPX Module can use up to 500 watts of power, the same amount the entire previous generation of Mac Pro was capable of using. Just for the graphics!
And that’s just for one card. AMD has prepared the fastest GPUs, the Radeon Pro Vega II in a dual configuration. Two Radeon Pro Vega II processors can fit into one MPX Module. The Mac Pro can accept two MPX Modules. Quad graphics from the most powerful graphics cards on the planet. More Mac programs are using Metal to accelerate basic tasks or game graphics, which means these GPUs have the capability to make everything you do faster.
What does this mean for graphics? An insane difference similar to the compute improvements we saw from the processors. Let’s take a look.
Comparing to iMac Pro
When it comes to graphics-heavy tasks, this single generation improvement is unparalleled. Nearly 5x faster 3D rendering than the already blazing fast iMac Pro with Radeon Pro Vega 64X graphics. While CPUs have slowed down their pace of improvement, graphics cards have exploded. With the quad setup in the Mac Pro, that difference is impossible to ignore.
Storage
The Mac Pro comes with up to 4TB of SSD storage. It only comes with solid state storage, to try to keep up with the speed of the processors. It’s removable and configurable, however, with all those PCIe slots, it would be simple to add many external connections. The storage is encrypted on the fly with the dedicated T2 security chip from Apple.
Ports
The Mac Pro has, from the factory, four Thunderbolt 3 ports (through USB-C), two USB-A ports, and two 10Gb Ethernet ports. You can add more Thunderbolt ports through the MPX Modules, and more connectivity through the PCIe slots. It’s easy to make your Mac Pro completely unique. You can add up to 12 Thunderbolt 3 ports. Each of those ports, with the right dock, like the 14 port dock from OWC, expands the abilities of this Mac even more. You’ll never run out of ways to connect peripherals to your Mac Pro.
Additional Specs
You can find out more about various configurations and specs on Apple’s spec sheet for the Mac Pro. Not every configuration will work with 1.5TB of RAM, for example. Apple doesn’t have their configurator online yet, but expect that to be available this fall. Likely in September or October.
Design and Size
Apple has a fun AR mode on Safari for the iPhone and iPad on their website. This means you can compare it in real time to your workspace. See how it would fit under your desk! I desperately have to clean up the cables under my desk, so I took a photo with less clutter. You can see what the Mac Pro would look like next to a few recognizable objects.
The skateboard is 28″ long, the controller is a Steelseries Nimbus, only a little smaller than an Xbox controller, there’s a standard-size puzzle cube, and a 68% keyboard (my Tada68) in the photo as well. That should give you an idea of the size of the new Mac Pro. It’s not as small as the trashcan Mac, thankfully. In fact, it’s about the same size as the 2012 Mac Pro. However, the weight is down about 2lbs from the high end factory configuration. The handles should be easier to hold as well, making it less unwieldy.
It looks smaller than Apple’s old Mac Pro, but it’s actually about the same size. It’s only an inch shorter in depth, and that’s really the biggest change about its dimensions. And that’s okay! We didn’t want something small that was difficult to work on. Professionals wanted a large machine, and that’s what Apple gave us.
Finally
This is it, ladies and gentlemen! The Mac Pro is finally a pro machine again. Apple pulled out all the stops and listened to nearly every single piece of consumer feedback. The machine they made is better than ever, and it’s exactly what professionals have been waiting for. It’ll surely be popular with pros. Now I just have to come up with a business justification for requisitioning one at work, because the starting price is $5,999 with 256GB of storage, and you know it’s going to need at least 1TB. Expect to spend as much on a Mac Pro as you would a new or used car.