“Small, fast and in a league of its own”, the early Mac Pro verdicts are in

Audiovisual professionals may have had a very long wait for a new Mac Pro, and that wait may not be quite over, but from the early hands-on reviews it seems they’re unlikely to be disappointed. The real performance of the machine is currently only being seen with Final Cut Pro, which Apple optimized to take full advantage of the dual GPUs, but it’s a near certainty that Adobe and others will follow this example.

It would be an understatement to say that Apple’s Mac Pro workstation was getting a little long in the tooth. As of summer 2012, it was missing Apple’s own Thunderbolt ports, not to mention 802.11n WiFi. Finally, though, Apple released an updated version, and it addresses a little more than just the wireless card and I/O options. Redesigned from the ground up, it’s now much smaller and lighter, with a space-age cylindrical shape, an overhauled cooling system that’s half as loud and a spec sheet that includes standard dual GPUs, PCIe SSDs, 802.11ac WiFi, up to 64GB of RAM and the latest Intel Xeon processors, once again going up to 12 cores. In short, these are specs that bring the Mac Pro into the modern age — and make it ready to handle the coming onslaught of 4K content.