You may have seen that I got a new Mac Pro; I wrote some first impressions of it last week. Now that I’ve been using it for a while – well, a few days – I have some more thoughts about this computer.
First, like the Mac it replaced (a Mac mini), it’s essentially invisible. While I have it visible on my desk, between my display and a speaker, I don’t notice it.
It’s so quiet that I can easily forget that it’s there. Not only is the fan quiet, but since there are no moving parts other than the fan – no internal hard drives – it doesn’t even transfer any vibrations to my desk.
But I do need access it occasionally. All the ports it has make it easy to connect peripherals; while I don’t connect and disconnect Thunderbolt cables, I do connect a USB cable from time to time, if I’m syncing or charging something (other than with the Lightning cable, which remains connected to the Mac Pro at all times).
The icons and borders that light up on the panel with all the plugs may seem like a gadget, but it’s actually quite useful when you’re connecting a cable.
While most of my work involves words, the Mac Pro is one fast computer. I sometimes need to convert music files that I’ve downloaded in FLAC; I use XLD, and I used to run it with four concurrent conversions. On the Mac mini, I’d get about 20x for each one. On the Mac Pro, I can run eight, at about 45x. Videos convert very quickly; I’ve already started digitizing a lot of my DVDs, and the Mac Pro is so quiet that I can run Handbrake while I work. With the Mac mini, the fan went into overdrive, making that an annoyance.
This is the first Mac I’ve had on the desktop that has USB 3. While I have a retina MacBook Pro with USB 3, I don’t often connect peripherals to it. But the Mac Pro is where my iTunes library lives, so I connect my iOS devices to sync them. The USB 3 transfer speed is noticeably faster than the USB 2 speed with the Mac mini, though I doubt that iOS devices can use the full speed available. But syncing a lot of content to an iOS device is at least twice as fast as before. Activity Monitor shows read speeds from around 30-45 MB/sec when syncing my iPhone 5s. (It’s likely that older iOS devices won’t sync as fast.)
Update: When I wrote the above, I had just assumed the iPhone 5s was a USB 3 device, but it’s not; it’s USB 2. As a commenter points out below, the difference in transfer speed highlights just how much USB depends on the CPU of a computer.
iTunes searches are fast, and, while iTunes has beachballed a few times, I’m pretty sure it’s because I have my external hard drives set to sleep when inactive, and iTunes needs to wake them up. I need to test this a bit more.
I’m having one sleep-related issue: it goes to sleep when I don’t want it to. If I’m downloading something, and I’m not in front of the computer and using it, it will go to sleep, and the download stops; depending on how I initiated the download, I may have to restart it. There are third-party apps that can prevent sleep, but the Energy Saver setting – Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off – doesn’t seem to work.
The Mac Pro has done exactly what a good computer should: it has made itself unobtrusive. I don’t hear it, and it doesn’t slow me down. It’s a shame one has to spend the kind of money this computer costs to get those features, and I hope that, one day, all computers will be like this. But for now, I’m quite satisfied with this new Mac Pro.