Weekly Poll: What do You Think of the New Mac Pro?
We all were expecting iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 to be announced at WWDC, and perhaps were hoping to see some new hardware, but no one predicted that the Mac Pro would get such a radical overhaul this year. Sure, Cook promised us that Apple hadn't forgotten pro users, and the old Mac Pro was the most outdated Mac Apple was still selling, but many of Apple's biggest fans and most popular developers had already given up on Apple doing anything interesting with the Mac Pro. The 27" iMac is beautiful and powerful anyhow, and Apple had already killed off the Xserve, so it didn't seem too much of a stretch to think that the Pro was next on the chopping block.
Boy, were we wrong. Apple absolutely had not forgotten Pro users, but instead was quietly building a fully redesigned Mac Pro that looked like nothing before (well, other than perhaps R2D2 with a bit of Darth Vader's style. Or a trash can. Or a Cray, if you squint.). With up to 12 cores on its CPU and two GPUs built in and designed to be used directly for computing power, the Mac Pro new in the way it works internally, as well. It's built to let you, as Apple says, edit 4k resolution video while live-rendering effects in the background. It can take up to 128Gb of Ram — or at least may, based on Apple's OS X Mavericks documentation.
Its only drawback for pros is that its not designed to be upgraded and expanded internally, relying instead on Thunderbolt 2 and USB 3 port for expansion. That, and the lack of dual CPUs, has some pros wringing their hands, wishing Apple had kept the upgradable design of the former Mac Pro.
What do you think? Is the new Mac Pro the True Mac Pro Successor that John Siracusa wished for, one that's for the computer industry what halo cars are for the automobile industry? Or is a computer that's already irrelevant, either by its lack of expandability or its inherent tie to the past of desktop computing?