2018 APPLE MAC PRO DESKTOP MAC OS X
To put it in perspective, if you were a freelance creative professional travelling around the world regularly, you could dump the Mac Pro in your carry-on for an international flight.Īpple’s Mac OS X Mavericks operating system, as with all other new Macs, is pre-installed on the Mac Pro. The entire Mac monolith doesn’t weigh more than 5kg - that might not sound like a lot, but it’s probably about a quarter of the bulk of a previous-gen Pro tower. The top lip, with a bit of airspace between the top of the aluminium cover and the Mac Pro’s blower fan housing, makes for a surprisingly useful handle. If you have access to a HDMI- or Thunderbolt-capable display at your destination, it’s really quite easy to unplug the Pro, sling it into a backpack with its wireless keyboard and trackpad, and carry it around. The Mac Pro is even portable, in its own odd way. This might seem like a lot, but it pales in comparison to competing digital edit suites like Avid. You can actually adjust the configuration of the Mac Pro significantly, if you have the disposable income the base 6-core model starts at $3999 and the completely upgraded 12-core system, sans accessories, costs an eye-watering $12029. My test Mac Pro was the mid-range model - using an Intel Xeon E5-1680 V2 8-core processor, 32GB of 1866MHz DDR3 RAM, a single 1TB PCI-Express soid-state drive, and twin AMD FirePRO D700 workstation graphics cards. If you had any ambient noise in your office - a desk fan, some colleagues talking, music playing - you wouldn’t hear the Mac Pro, even hard at work. It’s slightly surprising that such powerful components don’t require specialised water-cooling or a more outrageously large air-cooling system, but it works incredibly effectively - even in the heat of a third sequential Geekbench benchmark run, or while exporting a hundred 24-megapixel JPEG files from RAW in Adobe Lightroom, the Mac Pro’s exhaust fan was barely audible.
Unseen but not unwelcome is three-channel 802.11ac Wi-Fi, with antennas hidden inside the Mac Pro’s body - with a suitable wireless router, it’s incredibly fast, and means that if you’re in a business that doesn’t have wired Ethernet cables set up to every workstation, like a production house that relies on MacBook Pros, accessing networked storage is perfectly quick for everything but the most demanding use cases.
USB 3.0 seems almost superfluous - it’s definitely an inferior connection standard - but we see it being used more for input devices than high-speed storage. You could run three 4K monitors off the Mac Pro, hook up a Promise RAID for a Final Cut Pro X scratch drive, and import video from an external Elgato Thunderbolt SSD, all using the Mac Pro’s own Thunderbolt inputs, and still have one to spare. Having so many Thunderbolt 2 ports - and the ability to daisy-chain suitably compatible Thunderbolt 2 devices with each other - means that the Mac Pro is capable of being a multi-display, multi-storage video processing powerplant. Everything is organised in terms of priority - how often it’ll be used, and how long it’ll be plugged it when it is used. The attention to detail, in true Apple fashion, extends as far as the ordering of ports on the rear of the Pro the 240V power socket is at the base of the I/O panel, the mandatory HDMI video output is just above that next to the power button, then there’s twin Gigabit LAN ports (very important for serious production houses with SAN storage), then there’s the three-by-two array of six Thunderbolt 2 ports, then there’s four USB 3.0 ports, then headphone and line-level audio output 3.5mm jacks. I found that out first-hand when the machined lower air intake edges sliced my finger open. Sure, it picks up fingerprints like nobody’s business, and it doesn’t even have a visible power button at first glance, but this is a Mac that is designed to sit up on a shelf, away from peeking eyes and prying hands - it’s not made to be manhandled like a MacBook Air. It’s solid, it’s smooth, there are no visible edges, and it’s very pretty. The entire body of the Mac Pro, to the casual observer, could just be machined from a single solid billet of metal. That’s why it doesn’t look as lustrous as Apple’s product renderings.
But it’s also very reflective, and I photographed it in a room with a white ceiling and blue walls. A note on the photos in this review - the Mac Pro is black.