Apple mac pro 2013 used
I think that Apple is doing two things with this approach to expandability: one, it hopes to light a fire under third-party Thunderbolt supporters the way it did with USB and the iMac. Considering the still-high price of external Thunderbolt enclosures, the price of the Mac Pro better be reasonable, because it’s clear that many of us will be forced to take this route as well.
Now I will be forced to replace my existing eSATA RAID enclosure since eSATA/Thunderbolt adapters are stupidly expensive and there are no PCI slots in the machine to accommodate an eSATA adapter card. Anything more seems like too many-but zero extra drive bays is, to put it mildly, too few. The back of the new Mac Pro-the panel formerly known as "the inside of your tower."īut I don’t do much video work, and the four internal drive bays of the existing Mac Pro enclosure became a comfy standard for me and my work. Fortunately for me, “rack-mountable” isn’t on there either, since cylindrical isn’t the most server-ready format. A truly epic lack of expandabilityĪsk any Mac Pro users where “small size” sits on their list of workstation needs and they will tell you it's down at the bottom, squarely between “should make my bed in the morning” and “covered in fur.” The added desktop space will be nice to make room for those three shiny 4K displays that we can apparently afford, but “tiny” isn’t on my list of wants for a workstation. Which is good, because the stuff inside it better last. Expect companies like OWC to make Mac Pro-specific flash storage upgrades after the machine launches.Īs far as the other technologies go, it’s clear that Apple is pulling out all the stops to make the Mac Pro a serious professional’s tool that won’t get dated any time soon. Considering that Apple uses fast Samsung SSDs as standard in its laptops, I’m sure the company will slap a very fast SSD in the new Mac Pro. Since SATA3 tops out at 600MBps, it’s soon going to be the weakest link as the next generation of SSDs start to push beyond that range. Performance-wise, the move to PCIe-based internal storage as standard was really smart. If you haven’t seen the inside already, it’s a truly amazing bit of engineering, organized in a tube-like shape with a triangular arrangement of the motherboard elements along the exterior walls of the “thermal core,” a unibody-like heatsink that draws heat away from the GPU, CPU, and memory:Īn upgradable-ish SSD plugged into the Darth Pro over one of its GPUs. You get the feeling that the designers sat around coming up with ideas for the new Mac Pro and said, “If Darth Vader edited video, what would his computer look like?” Well. The designĪt 6.6" × 9.9" for its cylindrical stretched aluminum case, the new Mac Pro is tiny, and no other workstation-class Xeon desktop with a discrete workstation GPU-or two, in this case-looks anything like it.
Apple mac pro 2013 used full#
But now that Apple has a full site page for the new machine and I’ve gotten some info from people familiar with its internals and with OS X 10.9, the Mac Pro has become less of a mystery.īut that’s also what’s freaking us out. At first glance, the new machine was as mysterious as it was terrifying to me and many other creative pros who have been waiting for ages for this thing to drop. Hell finally froze over yesterday and Apple announced a new Mac Pro at WWDC.