Apple Mac Pro review (2013): small, fast and in a league of its own

It would be an understatement to say that Apple's Mac Pro workstation was getting a little long in the tooth. As of summer 2012, it was missing Apple's own Thunderbolt ports, not to mention 802.11n WiFi. Finally, though, Apple released an updated version, and it addresses a little more than just the wireless card and I/O options. Redesigned from the ground up, it's now much smaller and lighter, with a space-age cylindrical shape, an overhauled cooling system that's half as loud and a spec sheet that includes standard dual GPUs, PCIe SSDs, 802.11ac WiFi, up to 64GB of RAM and the latest Intel Xeon processors, once again going up to 12 cores. In short, these are specs that bring the Mac Pro into the modern age -- and make it ready to handle the coming onslaught of 4K content.

If you're a professional photographer, videographer, audio engineer, animator or what-have-you, you might actually be considering spending $2,999 on one of these -- maybe as much as $9,599, if you have the means. Or maybe you're just like my colleagues here at Engadget, who don't need one, and won't ever buy one, but covet it just the same. Either way, you'll want to read on to see how this thing actually performs (though you probably already have an idea).

HARDWARE

If the Mac Pro really does look like a trash can, as everyone says, it's much nicer than any rubbish bin I've ever owned. Starting with the shape, which seems to have earned it so much ridicule, the Mac Pro is basically a squat little cylinder, with a large circular opening up top where the heat creeps out. Between that and the glossy gunmetal "Space Gray" finish, it does indeed look like some sort of futuristic wastepaper basket.

Then, of course, you turn the thing around and notice the Apple logo, power button and a cutout in the anodized-aluminum exposure, making it easy to access the various ports. Not exactly a garbage can, that. All told, the Mac Pro is a compact little thing, standing 9.9 inches tall and measuring 6.6 inches in diameter. For whatever reason-- the photography on Apple's site, perhaps -- it feels smaller and shorter than I imagined it. To give you some perspective, the Pro stands around half as tall as a 27-inch monitor, like Apple's own Cinema Display, and has roughly the same footprint as an office phone. So if you have room for a landline, you almost certainly have room for the Mac Pro. And if you have enough room for a landline, you can probably get away with using the Mac Pro in other small spaces, like a music stage or the corner of a film set.

Speaking of the sort, the machine is light enough, at 11 pounds, that you could conceivably take it with you to your next shoot. Left uncovered, you'll want to handle it gingerly, of course, but if you keep the original box with the foam inserts, you should have no problem carrying it in the crook of your arm. In fact, that might not be such a bad idea: The glossy aluminum finish is also quite the fingerprint magnet, much more so than any other Apple products we've seen. If you do carry this around by hand, be prepared to wipe off some smudges now and again.

Swinging back to the ports for a moment, these include headphone and mic jacks, four USB 3.0 sockets, six Thunderbolt 2 connections, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and an HDMI 1.4 port. As a nice, even more futuristic touch, the power button glows white briefly when you turn on the machine, as do a few other accent lights around the ports. The LEDs even fade as you shut down the computer, and flick on again one by one as it's booting up. Additionally, you'll find a locking switch that keeps the removable aluminum enclosure in place (you can't actually power on the machine unless the cover is on). One thing you won't find here: a memory card slot. This makes sense, in a way, given that pros aren't big on SD cards, and there are simply too many other formats to accommodate on one small chassis. To build in, say, a CF slot, but not one for XQD would have been rather arbitrary indeed.

INTERNALS

Six paragraphs so far and I've only described the removable case. Slip it off and you get to the heart of the machine, a tall, three-sided board Apple is calling the "thermal core." Two of the sides are taken up by the GPUs -- dual graphics cards are standard here -- whereas the CPU occupies the third. I'll get to performance and configuration options in a moment, but for now, suffice to say you can configure this thing with two AMD FirePro D700 GPUs and 12GB of video memory, amounting to up to seven teraflops of computing power (the last Mac Pro maxed out at 2.7 teraflops). Meanwhile, there are two RAM banks (with two slots each), located on either side of the CPU board. Combined, these can accommodate up to 64GB of DDR3 memory, with bandwidth of up to 60 gigabytes per second.

With the exception of the processor, everything is user-replaceable -- the RAM, the GPUs and the solid-state storage. (I still wouldn't recommend that the average person replace the GPU himself, but then again, the Mac Pro isn't exactly for the average consumer in the first place.)

Speaking of thermal performance -- this is the thermal core, after all -- Apple designed a cooling system whereby air is sucked in at the base of the machine, and gets pushed out of that large hole in the top. Rather than use multiple fans, Apple went with just one, tweaking the size, shape, speed and spacing of the blades. In the end, the company's engineering team settled on backward-curved impeller blades, which spin at fewer revolutions per minute than on the last-gen Mac Pro.


The idea, of course, is for the blades to effectively cool the system, but also to make less noise in the process. According to Apple, the new Pro reaches 15 decibels while under load, versus 30dB on the last edition. And when the machine is idle, it simmers down to just 12dB -- very similar to the lower-powered Mac mini. As I'll discuss later in the review, the machine is indeed as quiet as advertised, though that may or may not come at the expense of some warm operating temperatures.
SOURCE: Engadget