“The current Mac Pro is a powerful beast, with a decent level of expandability. You can add PCI peripheral cards, extra hard drives, plenty of RAM, even an extra optical drive. What’s not to like?” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl.
“As with a car maker building a limited production luxury or sporty vehicle, the Mac Pro should represent the pinnacle of Mac technology,” Steinberg writes. “The new Mac Pro, with its smooth and curvy lines, certainly comes across as a halo product. But internal expansion is limited to an apparently removable Flash drive and four memory slots. For the rest, you have to depend on external expansion… With six Thunderbolt 2 ports, certainly there’s plenty of space to add stuff to the 2013 Mac Pro, assuming you can find the peripherals you want.”
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Steinberg writes, “One survey claims that 80% of Mac Pro users never upgrade their computers beyond changing RAM or replacing the hard drive. So why spend money for a larger chassis that goes unused? But for those who do need to upgrade or expand their Mac Pro’s capabilities, an expansion box ought to be a suitable replacement, and I’m assuming one with PCI slots and hard drive bays. For those who need that capability, you’d only need to connect two cables, one for Thunderbolt, the other to the power strip. It’s even possible, I suppose, for Apple to create an elegant solution when the Mac Pro is released.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote on Monday:
Who’s to say Apple or third parties won’t have stackable 6.6-inch diameter “expansion discs” that offer external drives, etc. that match and fit right underneath your Mac Pro and provide neat cord management solutions as well?
Think outside the box.
Related articles:
What professional Mac users think of Apple’s new Mac Pro – June 18, 2013
Apple’s new Mac Pro: Does internal expandability really matter? – June 17, 2013
Developer secretly tested new Mac Pro – sight unseen – for weeks inside Apple’s top-secret lab – June 14, 2013
Dvorak: A standing O for Apple’s new Mac Pro – June 11, 2013
Apple’s new Mac Pro would rank as the 8th most powerful supercomputer on planet Earth in 2003 – June 10, 2013
Up close and personal with Apple’s new ‘jet engine’ Mac Pro – June 10, 2013
With new Mac Pro, Apple gives sneak peek into the future of the pro desktop – June 10, 2013
