Apple Mac Pro Review

Garbage day.

Continuing onward with my exploration of the foreign Macintosh, I decided to jump straight to the top of the pile for this one. So after A bit of shopping I managed to snag a middle-spec Mac Pro for what obviously was not a cheap price. I by no means intend on keeping this thing since I already have a high performance desktop and this thing is just simply adding to the already encroaching on ridiculous wire clutter I have at my desk. Eventually I'm going to throw a bunch of parts in it and send it on it's way like I did with the MacBook I briefly covered on Twitter. However, just based off my experiences so far, I might just have to pick up another one of these in the future.

It's an Intel now so everything is okay again.

The Mac Pro is Apple's top of the line, high performance machine, replacing the old, and nowadays useless PowerPC based PowerMacs of the early 2000s'. The original Mac Pro was more or less a PowerMac G5 with Intel architecture chucked into it. It goes a lot deeper than that of course but they are pretty much identical from the outside. The problem with the old Mac Pro was that traditional desktops were becoming less and less favorable among most users due to their size and the All-in-One style was becoming more popular. Power users unfortunately had to stick with full sized desktops since All-in-Ones generally only favor casual computer users in terms of their specifications. In 2013, Apple decided it was time to refresh the Mac Pro in a market were small size tends to matter.

Size next to a monster from interstellar space, the Area 51.

This was the result, a compact, sleek, dark aluminum cylinder that according to Apple packs twice as much power than the dinosaur that came before it. It feels very dense when you hold it albeit rock solid, and unlike the old Mac Pro you can squeeze this little monster into some pretty cramped spaces. Everything about the Mac Pro feels and looks top notch. That's great, but is it functional? Now I was expecting the usual shit from Apple; abandoning all traditional computer design principals and soldering the hell out of everything to minimize space. You know, like they've done on almost every other machine they've put out in recent years? Man, was I wrong.

It's rare being intentionally able to see the guts of a machine with the fruit logo. 

In an almost radical departure from the Apple we all know, the Mac Pro manages to maintain an aspect of user upgradability. With the flick of a switch, the whole aluminum cover can slide right off the guts of the machine and it's satisfying as hell. Okay, sure Apple says you can only upgrade the RAM but with the right size Torx drivers, everything is accessible. And believe it or not, all these parts with the exception of the dual GPU cards are conventional parts! The RAM cards are standard size DDR3, the SSD is the same as you would find in a newer MacBook, and the CPU is an LGA 2011 socket Xeon chip. Isn't that a shocker?

Artsy close up of vents with bright ass lights in the background. So original.

The real trick to all this is how Apple handled the cooling system. In a regular desktop you have fifty bazillion fans pointed in every which way to push as much air as possible through the case and fans for almost every individual component. The Mac Pro decided to use a single, giant heat sink that runs lengthwise through the cylinder, cooled by one fan that draws air from the bottom and out of the top, very much a refinement of the same cooling system in the iMac G4. The two GPU cards, and the CPU are all linked to this one heat sink as opposed to having several individual cooling methods. As a result, it's much quieter and the design can be as small as it is. I knock on Apple for lacking innovation nowadays, but this is a really ingenious design.

One of the GPU cards interestingly has the slot for the SSD.

Let's get one thing straight though, this isn't a computer designed with casuals in mind. The spec sheet for the Mac Pro shows that it's got pretty serious users in mind. My particular model has the 3.5 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon processor, 16 GB of DDR3 RAM, a 256 GB SSD, and dual AMD FirePro D500s. This is just the middle-spec model and the Mac Pro can be optioned out to a 2.7 GHz 12-Core, 64 GB RAM, 1TB SSD, dual D700 monster for the price of $8560. Apart from it being the most expensive computer I've ever seen, the specs are vastly more than what needed by the average Facebook browser.

Thunderbolt and lighting, very very frightening me.

In the back, and actually somewhat inconveniently located are a multitude of ports. Headphone and speaker jacks, four USB 3.0 ports, six Thunderbolt 2 ports, two Ethernet, and an HDMI port. The massive amount of Thunderbolt somewhat makes up for the lack of some other conventional components such as regular hard drives since the machine can support up to 36 devices across those ports. You can also power up to three 4K monitors with it, probably more if they are lower resolution. Audio is taken care of by a cruddy little mono speaker somewhere in the bowels of the machine but I'd be willing to assume the people buying this thing have a better solution ready.

The same yet different.

This was the first time I've used a post-Lion version of OS X, now macOS Sierra outside of a Best Buy. Luckily it's not very different from the old versions functionality wise. Unfortunately my temporary peripherals didn't seem to jive well with the macOS. Trying to use a Windows keyboard on a Mac is slightly iffy and I mean really, natural scrolling direction? Unchecked, feels anything but natural. I went ahead and dove into stress testing the Pro in a multitude of ways just to see how it would handle it. It didn't surprise me that it essentially steamrolls through basic day to day tasks with ease. I thought back to the struggles of just trying to watch a YouTube video on the iMac G4. The Pro is a completely different animal.

Steam on a Mac? What is this heresy?

Naturally I installed Steam despite knowing that this thing was definitely not intended to be a gaming rig by any means. I was however surprised to find that 35 of my games actually worked on macOS! I went ahead and installed two games: Elite Dangerous and BioShock Infinite as they were some of the most graphically intensive games I had available. I'm basing the Mac Pro's performance against that of my Triple-SLI GTX 980 Area 51 which is roughly in the same price category but not with the same purposes in mind. Things didn't exactly bode well.

BioShock Infinite works quite well but I also learned that the macOS version of the game has been pretty much castrated compared to the Windows version. All the upper level graphics settings are gone and instead the game locks you out at normal. That being said, the game still looks nice and runs well that is if you don't mind playing Infinite on Xbox 360 grade graphics. I'm assuming they were intending the game to run primarily on run of the mill iMacs and didn't anticipate... actually more like forgot that the Mac Pro was a thing and could probably handle higher graphics levels. Only way I can test this game fully is through BootCamp and that just kind of defeats the purpose in my opinion. This is more of the developers fault and not the computer. 

Shit.

I ultimately jumped to Elite Dangerous only to find that it refused to start at all, as opposed to "just working". I decided that trying to run games on macOS wasn't just worth my time and if I was going to just run BootCamp, I should have bought a Windows machine to begin with. Point is, macOS isn't a really ideal gaming platform since a good majority of the games are just shoddy ports that either don't run properly or are limited look visually worse. I don't think that it's so much the Mac Pro's hardware itself than that game devs just don't really give a rat's ass about porting games over to a closed ecosystem running on proprietary hardware that's generally worse than what the rest of the gaming world uses. Mac Pro users are just a small minority in the macOS ecosystem so they get hit particularly hard by this since their hardware is capable of being up to scratch, and that sucks because I really want to see what this trash can is really capable of. Maybe next time.

Final Cut Pro X. It's like Sony Vegas but at the same time isn't.

Either way trying to game on the Mac Pro is like trying to use a pair of scissors to cut the grass; it kind of works but it's better suited for other things. The Mac Pro is a workstation, that's how it was intended to be and if those FirePro GPUs were of any indication, I don't know what is. The machine was made for professionals. It's the kind of thing you would expect to see in a design or film studio. The real use for this is that you're taking something macOS already excels at, the simplicity of doing real world shit and applying it to hardware that can handle more. Churning out perfectly edited photos, Hollywood grade films, that's the purpose of the Mac Pro is to be the be all, end all of productivity desktops. 

Now if it wasn't for the fact my Area 51 handles my personal, and in comparison rather puny productivity needs perfectly fine I would have probably come to appreciate this more. The Mac Pro just isn't something I have the need for. I'm not a Hollywood film maker, or a professional photographer. I'm just a run of the mill dipshit who games, types an occasional long ass blog post, and makes piddly YouTube videos and graphics just as a hobby. I don't have the need to appreciate macOS's simplicity and the powerful hardware running it because it's purpose exceeds what I would actually use it for. 

This all puts me into an odd conclusion. The Mac Pro is a fantastic computer, one of my all time favorites. It's a marvel of design and it still blows me away a little just how much power they crammed into that little cylinder, while still leaving a bit of room for upgradability. The simplicity of it's OS, one I've already explored before, but never on hardware this recent or powerful is a godsend for people looking to get things done as efficiently as possible. However, if you don't know what to do with it, if you don't know what to expect from it, the Mac Pro is a colossal waste of money. It's an odd creation coming from a company that typically sells fashion accessories with screens, it seems so distant from that whole ideology. It costs a premium for sure, but it feels like it was truly built with real innovation and built to be genuinely used. Among the rest of Apple's gaudy rose gold colored lineup today, it just feels the most right.

The Mac Pro starts at $2999.

Is it Better Than?

Mac Pro 1st Gen- Depends, the PowerMac G5 refit may be old but it still has a number of aces up it's sleeve. The 1st Gen lacks the size and silence advantage the new model has but it boasts far more upgrade potential rivaling that of traditional Windows desktops. Plus it can be had for much less minus any upgrades you decide to throw in it. A 1st Gen Mac Pro is still very viable indeed.








UPDATE: I did actually manage to get Elite Dangerous running after a bit of fiddling and I have to say I'm impressed. I didn't mess around in it too much but it ran on 3440 x 1440 resolution on the default Ultra settings with pretty surprising results. The game is very much playable and runs pretty stable at a smooth framerate although I have no exact figures. I wish I could try using the Oculus Rift with it but unfortunately(and unsurprisingly), the Rift does not support macOS. Anyways here is a screen shot I pulled from the game:

SPAAAAAAACE!