Much less than meets the eye.

Announced with much hype at this week’s Apple WWDC, the new MacPro is an exercise in trying to be different for difference’s sake, a solution looking for a problem. I stopped watching the hypefest after the third use of the now meaningless “awesome” and got on with better things.

2013 Mac wastepaper basket, errr …. Mac Pro.

Had they really thought about it, maybe the monolith from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ would have been a better form factor than a garbage can, but whatever. 1:4:9 form factors are nothing to make a joke of.

The driving thought behind this design – other than trying to look innovative – is the same as behind almost every Apple product. Take away user choice and lock up the box. The last Apple machine to offer user expandability in any meaningful way is the current MacPro. As Apple disregarded that machine as it morphed into a cell phone maker, the 2012 (more like 2007) MacPro is seriously overpriced and seriously dated, easily outperformed by any number of MacBook Pro laptops. Laptops! This has left a lot of graphics pros unhappy, with many migrating to high end HP and Dell workstations, trading the horrors of Windows for the speed of current silicon.

Now nothing Apple does to the MacPro will move the needle on its sales and profits, both a rounding error to the world’s largest technology company. But it’s a flagship product with high exposure to ‘tastemakers’ (ugh!) in Hollywood and much smarter people in Lawrence Livermore Labs, so as a vanity product it makes sense to retain it in the line. Apple has taken the approach of locking up the box, making it very small and doubtless thermally challenged (sound familiar?) and delegated all the storage goodness to external devices. With Intel’s Thunderbolt2 providing high speed connectivity, all your drives will be in very costly external enclosures, connected with TB cables. The Intel Xeon CPU and the twin AMD GPUs in the MacPro’s cylinder will do their thing on externally stored files. Sure you can use USB2 drives, but then much of what is good in the can is lost. However, there is an HDMI socket and the GPU supports 4K video, so this will make a great HTPC for the well heeled!

All of your old drives, heretofore cheaply connected internally running at 3GB/s (6GB/s never having made it to the MacPro) will have to be removed and placed in costly TB boxes or simply junked after the data are migrated. And as for the strange – comical almost – cylindrical shape, blackened in anticipation of huge thermal challenges, who on earth cares when the machine will immediately be stashed under the desk? Sure, the old MacPro is gorgeous to look at, but that’s a phase called ‘unpacking’. After that, it disappears, though unlike the 2013 model (“Awesome! 12% of the volume of the old one. Innovation!”) it will not fall over as soon as you accidentally kick it. Nor will it overheat when taxed. But, heck, with the 2013 MacPro feel free to enjoy the jumble of external boxes and cables which it will demand, and save on home heating bills, too. And as for PCIe expansion cards for all those high end audio and graphics users, fughedaboutit. And your apps use nVidia’s ‘awesome’ CUDA graphics acceleration technology? Ha! You’re out of luck because the ATI graphics in the new MacPro will not support that.

The costly 12core Xeon CPU and two AMD GPU specs, doubtless complemented by overpriced and soldered in SSD storage for the OS and apps, make it hard to think that this machine will sell for under $5,000. Call it $8k with external storage, optical drives, card readers, etc. Not that the desperately in want audience will care as, for the most part, they are spending the boss’s money, not their own.

Well, you can rejoice in the knowledge that the gadget will be assembled in the USA by four displaced Detroit auto workers who should adequately fill the demand.

The MacPro. Looking better already.

You will never be able to add the highest speed RAM to that old box, but you can plug in PCIe USB3 and Thunderbolt cards if needed, which makes it almost current while still running cool. As for DVD and Blu-Ray burners, no problemo.

It’s too bad more high end users will not make the time to learn the simple process of creating a Hackintosh. For 20% of the cost of a 2013 MacPro you get an ugly box, state of the art components and exceptional cooling, and no one will laugh at you when you show them just how ugly your box is. It’s the same box you assembled 5 years ago and have updated annually for $200 to maintain performance leadership. A Hummer isn’t pretty either, but its looks are consonant with its goals – brute strength and reliability. Much like a good Hackintosh. The 2013 MacPro is no Hummer. More like one of those low end plastic Mercedes beloved of the polyester set.

Hackintosh – the Hummer of computers.
Everything worth knowing in one picture.