New Mac Pros

So the new Mac Pros have been released to a chorus of disappointment and confusion in some quarters.

Why the hit whoring blogs have got the new Mac Pros completely wrong...

For the frst time Apple have produced Mac Pros for a truly wide gamut of creative professionals and creative applications from CPU dependent applications to High Performance Computing GPU optimised applications. I can't remember any previous Mac Pro range so configurable for such a wide range of production needs.

Many blog writers, including all of the usual suspects, piled into Apple and used the quiet update to the Mac Pro range to recycle the claims that Apple are no longer interested in the creative professional and Apple now follow rather than lead the desktop computer market. I write these words not as an Apple apologist but as someone who simply does not understand the full-scale anxiety in Apple's commitment to the higher end. Why the pre-occupation other than to draw traffic to feed advertisers?

The Mac Pro now supports processor options of 4, 6, 8, and 12 cores, dual GPU options, bucket loads of memory, and space for 8TB of HDD internally. Oh, but no USB 3 or more than 4 PCIE slots which for some people is simply too few! I see choices there for all budgets and production needs from photographers, to video editors, to colourists and 3D artists but according to one blog Apple has built a Mac Pro for no one! There's no argument that these Mac Pros are spendy in the extreme but that does not appear to be Apple's fault as I priced up a home brew PC based on similar specs as the new Mac Pro and it came out at a similar horrifying price. It may well have been a couple of hundred pounds cheaper but I would have to spend time building it and of course I could not run OS X legally on it and I wouldn't want to run Windows on anything that expensive as a personal choice which will further my credentials as a Apple fan-boi in some quarters.

What Apple were unable to announce, presumably not to piss nVidia off by stealing their thunder, was that aforementioned GPU makers are bringing the Quadro 4000, a step change in GPU power, to the Mac in October. That isn't all, it will be a single slot card as described by nVidia as a cost effective solution, perhaps a nod to their previous Quadro attempts on the Mac that weren't cost effective at all. Two of these bad boys in the Mac Pro and you've got the beginnings of an awesome Davinci Resolve station add a BM card, RAID and control surface and you're set to tread on some pretty major toes (assuming you have talent!). AD's Smoke and Adobe's CS5 suite would also be a very nice accompaniment to the Quadros too. Adobe claims 1 Quadro 4000 is capable of streaming 4 streams of full res RED 4K. Clearly no need for that over priced proprietary RED Rocket card any longer. Bin it along the a long line of other proprietary accelerator cards that have dotted recent history.

If I was buying a new Mac Pro for Davinci Resolve what would it be? (I'm not, I lost too many clients to the recession but as business builds again this is what I'll most likely purchase.)

I'd certainly look no further than the single 6 core/12 Thread 3.33GHz model, 2 Quadro 4000s, 8 GB RAM, BM card and RAID. The 6 core is comfortable faster than an 8 core Harpertown Mac Pro in most operations and Resolve really will eat up those 2 Quadros quite nicely.

I've been doing a bit more reading into the Quadro 4000 and found that it is quite a cut down version of the Fermi family and way lower in spec than a nVidia GTX 460 card. This also means that the BTO option of the ATI Radeon 5870 is an excellent choice as it has a comparable performance to the nVidia GTX470 only trounced by the GTX 480. For a workstation running Final Cut Studio the 5870 looks to be an excellent choice for the here and now and the future too comfortably more powerful than a single Quadro 4000. Maybe nVidia will bring the consumer range to the Mac perhaps a GTX 480 in due course. The rumour sites were reporting drivers for that particular card had been leaked or found in a developer build of OS X. Who knows? If true that will mean even greater choice for the Mac owner.

But you haven't mentions lack of Blu-ray I hear someone cry at the back. Fuck Blu-ray, I'm with Jobs on this. Blu-ray won a format war that was absolutely nothing about providing the consumer with affordable high quality content but all about the studios maintaining control of the market. This limits our choices in the way we want to consume media and until the studios learn that we are entering, er, have entered a new era where the user should choose the mode of reception I will remain a devout Blu-ray avoider.