Apple previews next Mac Pro, but who will buy?


Big unveiling here of the much maligned Mac Pro. Those who hung on to the dream of an update were rewarded with a reason to keep waiting. Essentially unchanged for years, Apple announced not only the first significant upgrade, but a complete revamp of the company's high-end Mac workstation. It's expected to ship later this year, and while pricing hasn't been announced, it will be expensive.

It features pricy Xeon CPUs, dual GPUs, Thunderbolt 2, PCIe flash storage. The specs are about as striking as the industrial design. Kind of resembling the old SGI Octane, which had a striking presence for its then power, the new Mac Pro looks like a cylindrical power cell.

It looks cool with great specs, but who will buy one? There's no internal expansion for PCIe or drives. All expansion is via the new Thunderbolt 2 ports, which is ample at up to 20 Gb/sec of bandwidth, but still means stacks of pricy external boxes, and in the case of PCIe, uncertain device support in an external chassis. The product clearly seems geared towards those where time is money when it comes to their Mac. Unfortunately for high-end consumers small sized professionals a lot of CPU power + less expansion, and presumably high prices, seem to make the Mac Pro even less attractive to than the current Mac Pro.

Really wish Apple would have offered an affordable quad-core i7 workstation. Basically an iMac with PCIe + drive expansion and sans display. It won't have the kick of a souped up Xeon with dual GPUs, but the market has to be bigger.

Well, at least there's still Hackintosh.