“Do you need a new Mac Pro or merely want one?” Anthony Frausto-Robledo asks for Architosh. “There can be a subtle difference often between those users who want a new Mac Pro and those users who actually need one. Are you more a Prosumer user or a Pro user? Are you a studio-based Pro or a small independent Pro? Does your production pipeline consists of the teamwork and interoperability of others or is it mainly just you?”
“Apple didn’t just wake up one day and say, ‘let’s make a radical new computer just for fun!’ The new Mac Pro is indeed a complete rethinking of what a desktop or workstation computer can be but it was built for a set of purposes,” Frausto-Robledo writes. “Chief among those is the film editing market and the effort Apple is putting into recapturing the hearts and minds of film pros who lost significant faith in the company after the Final Cut Pro X debacle.”
“For Final Cut Pro X users the new Mac Pro is low-hanging fruit. It’s a no-brainer…as they say. And the numerous test results demonstrate this. If Final Cut Pro X is your livelihood, you likely need a new Mac Pro,” Frausto-Robledo writes. “If you spend a lot of time in Final Cut Pro X, use Apple’s Motion and Compressor, if you are a Photoshop CC or CS6 power user, or utilize one or more of the OpenCL compute-intensive apps above than the new Mac Pro will likely greatly accelerate your workflow and be worth every penny in productivity speed-up!”
Much more in the full article here.
Uh, I WANT a Mac Pro.
Read most of the article. I think it is an excellent article that balances the pros and cons, with nary a Mac bias.
Thank you Anthony.
I have three deployed in my office with two more on order. We use for running finite element analysis software that is only available in windows.
The mac Pros boot up in windows faster than a windows PC. There is no bogging down the Mac side when running parallels.
It is truly amazing.
A Mac Pro is the only desktop Mac that would work for me.
Would not take a Mac Mini with Intel Integrated Graphics for a desktop machine.
I use a KVM running 4 computers, so an iMac wouldn’t work. (And I don’t like multiple displays.)
That leaves a Mac Pro. Or a Hackintosh. Would prefer a Mac Pro, but might have to consider building a Hackintosh in the future.
I really wish Apple had something between the Mini and the Pro that wasn’t an iMac.
I don’t even come close to needing one. But I do *want* one!
i run a broadcast audio studio with lots of diverse clients with very diverse needs.. I need one.
The problem with the “Mac Pro” is not the components- it is the foo foo case with no internal storage or expansion. The Xeon CPUs and such are all top drawer stuff, the problem is Jony Ive and form over function.
I do not want to buy a ThunderDud cable and an ugly third party box for external drives. A proper tower would be much better.