Yesterday I wandered into the Apple store in Sydney and had a look at the new Mac Pro. They only had a single 4-core base model hooked up to Thunderbolt display.
First impressions were that it's very shiny - more of a mirror-like finish than black metal. It also had quite a lot of fingerprints from curious people like myself.
The unit is about the size that I expected, but is surprisingly heavy. I was interested in its portability, and I think this could be a stretch to carry as airline hand-baggage; probably just within economy class weight limits (7kg I think?) if you have a laptop or iPad as well.
I didn't get a chance to run any benchmarks which would have required installing software, so I just played around with the usual apps. They had FCP, but I don't recall whether it was the latest version optimized for the nMP GPUs. It felt quite fast, but not especially faster than an i7 iMac or rMBP. It did seem to boot very fast when I tested a cold start. I imagine that one needs to do something that stresses the CPU/GPU to really see a difference between the nMP and other high-end Macs.
What I did notice when moving the unit around, was that the Thunderbolt connector to the display got pulled our really easily - you would need to have a lot of cable slack in real use to prevent this; there is very little "grip" in the TBolt connector. This could be a signifiant problem if you have storage devices connected.
Overall, it looked like a nice machine (although my wife, who had never seen one or even read a single review, said it looked like an ashtray). I'm not convinced that the 4-core model is anything special unless you're using the GPUs, but time will tell whether more software makes use of these in the future.
I think it falls into the "wait and see" category for me.
First impressions were that it's very shiny - more of a mirror-like finish than black metal. It also had quite a lot of fingerprints from curious people like myself.
The unit is about the size that I expected, but is surprisingly heavy. I was interested in its portability, and I think this could be a stretch to carry as airline hand-baggage; probably just within economy class weight limits (7kg I think?) if you have a laptop or iPad as well.
I didn't get a chance to run any benchmarks which would have required installing software, so I just played around with the usual apps. They had FCP, but I don't recall whether it was the latest version optimized for the nMP GPUs. It felt quite fast, but not especially faster than an i7 iMac or rMBP. It did seem to boot very fast when I tested a cold start. I imagine that one needs to do something that stresses the CPU/GPU to really see a difference between the nMP and other high-end Macs.
What I did notice when moving the unit around, was that the Thunderbolt connector to the display got pulled our really easily - you would need to have a lot of cable slack in real use to prevent this; there is very little "grip" in the TBolt connector. This could be a signifiant problem if you have storage devices connected.
Overall, it looked like a nice machine (although my wife, who had never seen one or even read a single review, said it looked like an ashtray). I'm not convinced that the 4-core model is anything special unless you're using the GPUs, but time will tell whether more software makes use of these in the future.
I think it falls into the "wait and see" category for me.
