The New Mac Pro

Well at WWDC Apple announced the new Mac Pro. This has taken a long time to come. The Mac Pro last received a major update in 2010 and in 3 years a lot can change in computer hardware. With the old Mac Pro sporting either a ATI HD Radeon 5770 or 5870 you feel that there was definitely need for an upgrade, however the upgrade of the Mac Pro was not just to the computer hardware but also to the overall look of the Mac Pro.

The new Mac Pro is an eighth of the size of the previous version but with even more power and comes in at 6.6" × 9.9" which is extremely tiny. The case is circular and, to me, looks rather like a bin but the engineering behind this is incredible. Inside "the bin" the motherboard is in a triangular arrangement around the exterior walls of the case. Astonishingly the case only has one fan and so will operate like a wind tunnel blowing air through the case and out the other end. This is really quite an amazing design feature and will make this mac very quiet, something I am always trying to achieve with my PC.
These are the specs are of the new Mac Pro and I will go into each one in more detail later on: dual Intel Xeon E5, dual Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 1.4, Thunderbolt 2.0 with DisplayPort 1.2 support for up to three 4K displays, 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 4.0, 1866MHz ECC RAM, PCIe-based flash storage, and dual AMD FirePro GPUs with up to 6GB of VRAM.
It will come with dual Xeon E5 and up to 12 core configurations which suggests that there maybe a cheaper alternative model which only offers 6 cores. This is highly regarded processor and the next upgrade is due to come out this fall so the new Mac Pro will probably be shipping with that latest version.
A huge selling point for the new Mac Pro is the ability to support three 4K dispalys out of the box. This is remarkable but by the time that this is released will it be that huge? At the moment 4K displays are very expensive with the cheapest being over £1000 so buying 3 of them will most likely cost more than the Mac Pro itself. The price of 4K may come down over time but they will come down enough to make them attractive to the masses for a few years I believe. However people buying Mac Pros will not be the average buyer and will have quite a lot of money. This seems to me that Apple are making sure that they will not have to make another upgrade for another few years.
The graphics cards have finally been upgraded to, what we assume will be, the latest AMD FirePro GPUs. This will be a vast improvement but what is even better is that they will be shipping with 2 graphics cards. Again Apple has specified what the specs will be of the GPU and they have said "up to 6gb VRAM" which suggests again that there will be different versions of the Mac Pro and they will be customizable.
Apple have decided to do away with hard drives completely and with regular SSDs and they have decided to go PCIe-based flash storage. This will be much faster even than SATA SSDs witch have average speeds of 500Mb/s were as PCIe-based flash storage has average speeds of 1250Mb/s which is ridiculously fast.
AC is the latest innovation in wireless technology but is not that big yet as it pretty new and is not expected to be a common thing until 2015. The only other device I know that has this, and I only know this because I have it, is the HTC One. This is just a nice bit of future proofing from Apple.
While this computer has got some incredible specs such as supporting 3 4K monitors and the PCIe-based flash storage the main problem with the Mac Pro is the look of it. Apple have always done well with aesthetics of their products but I think that this time they have got it wrong. Not only does it look like a bin but it is also too small and too odd of a shape. The way that it is designed has meant that the motherboard has been put together in an strange way and this limits expandability. Maybe this is not the target market that Apple are going for but I think it will limit them a bit.