Gadgetory

well this is David with a verge and this is Apple's new Mac Pro after years of seemingly neglecting the professional market releasing virtually no new high-end hardware and even making its software more beginner friendly at the expense of some established features and workflows the Mac Pro has undergone a huge change there's a new chassis and I'll get to that but ultimately it's what the Mac Pro does that matters and inside this machine for the base price of two thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollars is a quad core three point seven gigahertz intel xeon e5 processor along with twelve gigs of ram two AMD FirePro d300 graphics chips and 256 gigs of solid-state storage our review unit was upgraded to a three gigahertz eight core processor 64 gigs of ram a one terabyte solid-state drive an AMD's fire pro d700 GPUs add in the 32 inch 4k sharp display apple offers and the apple keyboard and magic mouse and we're using eleven thousand eight hundred and twelve dollars of mac pro for the eight thousand ninety nine dollar price of this pro alone you could buy the highest end iMac possible stick it on the floor underneath your desk and hook up that same sharp 4k monitor and save thousands of dollars the pros black case is removable letting you access a lot of the devices parts you can swap out the solid state hard drive the GPU or upgrade the RAM all very easily but they require seriously specific hardware it's not nearly as expandable as the last generation pro either Apple made Thunderbolt for that it'll mean a lot of messy desks next to the small Tower but it also makes moving devices and storage around a lot easier in most cases this machine is clearly and explicitly made for people who work with video for a living so we gave our mac pro to our video team along with a red epic camera just to see how they felt what they found basically was the de Mac Pro is the fastest most impressive Mac ever sometimes especially if you also use Final Cut Pro 10 which was able to playback for different 4k streams simultaneously with color correction on best performance mode dropping few frames and looking really clean in full resolution mode there were noticeable drop frames though the new Final Cut Pro 10.1 is optimized to take advantage of those dual GPUs they're really doing the heavy lifting here and that makes the experience of using Final Cut feel extremely smoother than the Mac Pro but for our video team and frankly most video teams that doesn't really matter The Verge video crew uses Premiere Pro CC for editing and in that case what the Mac Pro offers isn't quite so obvious more than once a 2010 Mac Pro actually rendered videos faster than the new model up to 25% faster native non transcoded 4k red footage only played back smoothly at 1/4 or 1/2 of its native resolution that seems to be because premiere only uses the Mac Pro CPU cores not its GPUs to handle video processing presumably Adobe could update its apps to address this specific hardware but until it does premiere on the Mac Pro is a story of diminishing returns and in general premier is the same experience it always is on any other machine whether you're editing 1080p footage or 4k footage at half resolution and once you're editing footage at that resolution Premiere feels like it always has the most obvious improvement in this year's Pro is the throughput with fast solid-state storage and fast RAM the machine reads and writes insanely fast a 30-second clip from a completely rendered timeline in Premiere exported to a pro res QuickTime in two seconds when software is written to take advantage of the pros dual GPUs it screams that's why playing for streams of 4k video raw from a red camera is possible at all but when it's not it shows BioShock Infinite still stuttered at high settings and nearly 4k resolution its benchmark scores are spectacular but the pro can be a little underwhelming in surprising places of course it's early and Apple includes two GPUs on every Mac Pro for a reason so that developers will take advantage they almost certainly will and a couple of apps already have but until they do the overall speed advantage of the mac pro over the last generation or even a high-end imac isn't all that obvious the most striking thing may be the only truly huge change here is how the new pro looks instead of a big boxy silver rectangle it's now an iridescent obsidian grey cylinder with slits at the top and bottom it's incredibly reflective taking on the colors that surround it at nine point nine inches tall six point six inches in diameter and about eleven pounds the pro is a hefty computer while still being infinitely more portable than the last model it almost doesn't look like a computer more like desk storage or I guess a trash can all that gives it away as a Mac Pro is the Apple logo on the back which sits above the computers many ports on a single panel are four USB 3.0 ports six Thunderbolt 2 ports two gigabit ethernet jacks speaker and headphone ports and an HDMI port everything's on the back which is nice looking but it's also harder to access than before there's a growing ecosystem of Thunderbolt accessories and the Mac was very much designed to be a hub for all your add-ons not to have them all inside what's inside the Mac Pro is what really counts but there's no question Apple's done something remarkable here the new Pro is small and light enough to be really easy to move around you can fit four Mac Pros in the space of one old one and in many cases that's really important it's going to be a lot more friendly to crews that have to constantly move around on sets or musicians that have to break down and move their rig every single night it also runs really quietly though it does get pretty warm as it pushes air at its top vents and you really shouldn't cover its bottom or top slits so it can keep pushing air through the new Mac Pro is in a lot of ways exactly what pros have been asking for it's faster it's smaller more powerful yet quieter it has two GPUs a fast processor though it's not exactly a huge upgrade in that department plenty of expandability thanks to thunderbolt and a pretty big bump for all things graphical it's the fastest Mac yet in most ways but it's not yet a revolution or a total game changer for anyone but the most space conscious of video crews it's a really good really expensive really cool-looking Mac that should get even better as developers start taking advantage of all its hardware that's it to some people people who probably already know who they are that's worth upwards of three thousand dollars but for others including just about everyone on the verge video team they're not throwing out their IMAX and old Mac pros just yet you