“While its trashcan form factor may work well for some (perhaps, as a new Mac mini pro, or maybe Mac Pro mini), it’s inadequate for traditional Mac creatives/professionals. For real pros, it’s a plain and simple failure.”
John Kheit lets loose with a lot of complaints about the “new” Mac Pro, released at the very end of 2013, and not upgraded since. He laments that fact that other Macs are faster, and that:
Poor trashcan Mac users have been forced to live like animals with rats nests of external drives, cables, PCI cages (because lots of people still need expansion cards)–all of these things are big, clunky, with noisy fans (rendering the quietness and compactness of the trashcan Mac meaningless), all while sucking up more power than the tidy integrated cMP.
I bought a Mac Pro in mid 2014, and I loved it. For the work I do, it was great. You could argue that, as a writer, I didn’t need such a powerhouse, and I don’t. However, I had decided to start digitizing my DVD and Blu-Ray collection, and the Mac I had previously – a Mac mini – just wasn’t up to the task.
(You can read my first impressions of the Mac Pro and my second impressions.)
I loved the look of the Mac Pro, and it was dead quiet. I did have to connect it to external hard drives, but that was just a single Thunderbolt cable. The USB cables, however, along with another cable to my Thunderbolt display, did make it a bit of a mess. Apple designed an attractive computer, but didn’t provide a way to keep the cables from looking unsightly.
What finally made me give up on it, however, was the fact that Apple hadn’t – and still hasn’t – released a standalone retina display. So when the 5K iMac was released, I bought one instantly, and sold the Mac Pro. It wasn’t easy though. The price of a new Mac Pro on eBay had dropped by 20%, and, fortunately, I had bought my Mac Pro with a discount (thanks unnamed Apple Store employees), so I didn’t lose too much money. But of the many used Macs I sold over the years, this was the hardest one to sell.
If Apple had released a standalone retina display, I’d have kept the Mac Pro; it really was a cool computer. But seeing what’s happened since then – no changes to the computer in two years – shows that Apple just doesn’t care. Or, that iMacs can do pretty much everything that pros need, as long as they have some Thunderbolt peripherals.