Apple is reknowned for its products' covetability as much as their utility and the cuttingness of their edges ever since the Steve Jobs-Jony Ive dream team changed the home computer landscape with the iMac way back when. However the Mac Pro has, despite some nice touches and metallic construction, been the utilitarian of the Apple desktop family, with its no-nonsense frame and power to compete with the top-end PCs.
The new Mac Pro changes things. It is curious and beautiful, with its huge computing power finally being matched by that want-one intangible that so many other Apple products have built-in. So does the anthracite metallic cylinder mean that finally OS X-loving designers can have their cake and chow down? We've grabbed hold of one and now present five reasons why you will want to do the same when it is released in early 2014.
01. Its design
The old Mac Pro was something that you hid under your desk - not so the new one. At 9.9in high, 6.6in diameter, and weighing 11lb, it's 100 per cent gorgeous and can sit next to your monitor set-up with pride.
As you can probably see, it's not the easiest thing to photograph with its shiny-shinyness and dark metal that would give Disaster Area (opens in new tab)'s stunt ship in The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy a run for its money in the 'dark and cool' stakes.
Watch our colleagues at MacFormat (opens in new tab) get up close and personal when they unboxed the Mac Pro - look how excited they are:
02. Its power
We won't dwell on this area - you can check out the Apple Store (opens in new tab) and Techradar's review (opens in new tab) for the full tech spec - but it has serious power that top-end graphic designers and 3D artists will comfortably be able to utilise to their hearts' content.
Briefly: dual workstation-class AMD FirePro GPUs - standard in every Mac Pro - provide up to 12GB of video memory, with up to 528GBs of memory bandwidth for manipulating complex models with massive geometry and large textures.
If that's not enough for you, you can upgrade to 12-core Intel Xeon E5 processors - with up to 60GB/s of memory bandwidth - which will make rendering tasks incredibly fast. And PCIe-based flash storage (up to 1GB) and 1866MHz memory make quick work of virtually everything you do.
03. It's a Mac
Okay, this one will entirely depend on your personal preference in terms of operating system, but for certain creatives only a Mac will do. The Mac Pro ships with the very latest version of OS X Mavericks, and there are some people who reckon that Apple's operating system is the best fit for the ubiquitous Adobe software.
04. Did we mention its design?
05. Its expense
More expensive means better, right? The basic Mac Pro will set you back $2,999 (£2,499) but the six-core version is $3,999 (£3,299) and it can be specced-up to leave you very little change from $10,000 (opens in new tab) and more once you've added 4K monitors... Now, you could get a hugely powerful PC for half of that, but that's a can of worms which shall remain unopened for now...
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Will you be buying the Mac Pro? Do you have a better smartphone camera than us? Tell us in the comments!
