Gadgetory

hey what is up guys I'm KB HD here and this is the late 2013 early 2014 Mac Pro and yes it is very very small see this is a weird little desktop from Apple so for the past decade or so Apple has been slowly moving away from the pro market from their software all the way through to their hardware PC sales have been slowing down their iPads and iPhones have become way more popular and money-making and there's just really not that much money in professional workstation grade machines anymore and for a while Apple just straight-up ignored the whole pro market and for years never updated the Mac Pro until now and about 1 so this review is actually coming from a bit of a different perspective versus the typical Mac Pro buyer the normal Mac Pro buyer from maybe 2007 up until the latest generation before this one would have the Mac Pro sitting dormant in a corner of a studio somewhere and would use it to power their displays for music production or video production or whatever they do the typical Mac Pro buyer doesn't use it as a full-time workhorse and everyday machine so that's where my review is coming in as someone who's actually going to be using this everyday for stuff like you know web browsing the typical everyday light load stuff and I also happen to do some production as well so that's the way this review is sort of framed so the main thing about this new Mac Pro is its size obviously it's much smaller than not only the previous generation Mac Pro but really any other desktop computer let alone a high-end one it's really the only desktop that you can hold like this at least I'm pretty sure it is anyway but the thing is that doesn't really matter much I mean it's a 10 inch tall 11 pound cylinder that in theory you could put in a backpack and bring wherever you want as a sort of a portable studio with you but that is a very very small group of people actually doing that plus you need to monitor anyway but Apple is still very proud of how small they've made this machine they talk about it all over their site and in all their promo material and you know that that that is pretty impressive still it's smaller than some full-size graphics cards it kind of forces itself on your desk with that shape and reflective aluminum shell of course because it is this small it makes the cooling situation pretty interesting now as far as heat and noise and thermals go Apple in general has a long history of cooling things as little as possible mainly because apple hates moving parts I mean you don't have to look very far in other Apple products to see that so as far as fans go there is just one single fan cooling every component in this workstation great desktop I'll say that again there is one fan cooling this whole desktop now it is small and there is a lot of hype about it but it's what they call the thermal core and it actually does a surprisingly good job so the way the thermal core works is this you essentially have all the components of the Mac Pro in this case that's the graphics cards the terabyte of flash storage the eight core Xeon processor and all the RAM the motherboard everything all up against the three sides of the prism on the inside it looks like a triangle from above and the center of it is empty and this is where the air flows from the bottom to the top cooling all of the parts with the same airflow so these vents you see on the bottom of the Mac Pro yeah you do not want to block those because that is all of the intake that's where it's in taking all the cool air and the single fan we talked about is up top sucking air through the whole system and because it's such a large fan it actually doesn't have to spin very fast to move a lot of air and actually found the thermal core to be really effective it kept the system at a reasonable temperature pretty much no matter how hard I pushed it and video editing with Adobe Premiere and After Effects I really got the fan to spin up I mean the thing is pretty much silent strangely the only time I could actually get the fan to spin loud enough to even hear it and it's three feet away on my desk was watching a bunch of YouTube videos in a row so thanks Adobe Flash anyway this thermal core is such a boss at cooling it works so well that performance on this mac pro is also fantastic it all just flies through mac OS 10 mavericks as you would expect i mean it costs a pretty penny you would expect it to fly through its native OS and it does i've had absolutely no hiccups it outperforms the hackintosh pro I built it flies through apps like no other machine I've ever owned and it's an absolute breeze to use during everyday single-threaded tasks so that's good news now personally when I get to the more heavy stuff take advantage of all eight cores like I mentioned I use Adobe Premiere and a bit of After Effects like I said for video editing and these apps are clearly not optimized for this new hardware because I actually don't really see a difference in performance between the Mac Pro and the hack Pro I built and used for so long some of this has to do with the fact that it's a beast of a workstation GPU not a regular gaming graphics card so the d700 Adobe just doesn't know how to talk to them yet and really it's up to Adobe at this point to get this system in their hands test it optimize it for this new hardware and push out the updates to all of us Mac Pro users because I would love to see the improvements that Apple's Final Cut users are seeing on this Mac with the Adobe suite but either way I'm not going to drill through benchmarks again for that I will refer you to the Mac Pro performance review video that I did it'll be linked right below that like button if you want to check out how it compared against my hackintosh pro and another Mac that I've used also another youtuber Armando Ferreira put together a PC for the same budget as this Mac Pro and ran benchmarks of his own on that side so of course it's still running Windows but with that video also linked below you can get a better sense of how you'll do with the price to performance ratio now another thing you have to talk about is the i/o on the new Mac Pro because it's a little bit different from the old Mac Pro but it's also very different from most other desktops as a workstation you're getting four USB 3.0 ports you're getting six Thunderbolt 2.0 ports you're getting two ethernet jacks and you're getting hdmi 1.4 that is it now actually have a seven port USB 3.0 hub that I used I don't think USB expandability is a problem but that brings us to the biggest difference between this Mac Pro and the old Mac Pro not just the size but that's the difference between the words upgradability and expandability this new Mac Pro is a hundred percent upgradable which you can't actually even say about the old Mac Pro but it is not internally expandable you have to expand through thunderbolt 2.0 and if you can't get what you want done through thunderbolt 2.0 this machine is not for you this is going to affect a lot of people who are using PCI based solutions like they were on the old Mac Pro there are no open PCI ports in the new Mac Pro so if you want something like a red rocket or a new video card or something like that it has to be done through Thunderbolt right now that situation doesn't look as promising or as friendly as we might want it to be but hopefully in the near future there's way more Thunderbolt accessories that were previously PCI accessories so at the end of the day is the Mac Pro a good buy right now it's not going to seem like a good buy because you know the Adobe apps aren't optimized there's a whole bunch of things missing in terms of expansion and it doesn't really look like a complete package and people aren't exactly throwing away their old Mac Pros or IMAX who are working on production just yet those will still have their place in the studio but for me as a person who's using it as a full-time machine as a person who uses it every single day and also does production I feel like it's been a really great investment and of course there's a whole bunch of different Mac Pro's the four core the six core the eight core and the twelve core I feel like I did actually make the right choice as I explained in the performance video with the eight core Mac Pro as a sort of a balance between single threaded and multi-threaded apps so basically there's going to be a ton of overpriced trashcan jokes we already know that people who haven't made it this far in the video probably have already left that comment below but the idea here is it's got a future ahead of it there is not going to be another new Mac Pro for probably ten more years as we've seen with the old Mac Pro in the history of the way Apple has updated it so you know come back to me in 2018 and maybe we'll have a totally different story to tell about this new interesting innovative small compact Darth Vader looking machine that we call the Mac Pro either way that's been it thank you for watching hope you enjoyed this review video again I'll leave the links to the performance review I did of the Mac Pro and of the unboxing and first impressions down right below that like button if you want to check them out thanks for watching I'll talk to you guys in the next video peace member