UrbaneLegend

I've been a consistent Mac Pro buyer over the last decade and a half, I have two of them, iMacs and various laptops, phones and iPads in my studio because as a small studio I've already started moving to Windows. I hung on long enough that 18 months ago I built a custom PC workstation and haven't looked back.

I always left the door open for Apple if they were going to give me the Mac Pro I really needed effectively a reboot of the classic Cheese grater. I'm afraid this new Mac Pro is not it even if it might look like it from an aesthetic point of view, the absurd cost does not make financial sense any way you look at. $6k base price for a low end workstation is ridiculous, a teenager would laugh at those specs, a $6k workstation shipping with a 3 year old GPU! It's embarrassing. The Vega II GPUs if you go by the similar mass produced Radeon7 GPUs for the PC are likely going to be minimum $800 for a single GPU and $1600 for the DUO version plus a huge slice of Apple tax. The SSDs in the Mac Pro are proprietary so you're going to get shafted on SSD upgrades to the pathetic 256GB base. I'd be surprised if the 28 core BTO wasn't >$4-5k given the iMac Pro 18 core BTO is $2.5k.

As a 3D artist I've always had high end Mac Pro requirement, I've always needed as much CPU and GPU power that you can throw at the problem but I there's no way I could justify a Mac Pro built to suit my workflow needs. The Xeon 28 core is already matched by the 32 core Threadripper at half the price and in a few short months AMD are announcing 48 core and maybe even 64 core Threadrippers that will annihilate the very top spec Mac Pro. nVidia's 20 series is already working with the GPU based renderer I use, Redshift who knows if the Vega II GPUs will offer anything like the performance.

For 3D, compositing and video editing the traditional bread and butter for Mac Pro buyers you'd be insane to consider the new Mac Pro over a vastly higher spec PC at probably a third to half of the cost.

I find it strange that a professional user in the article would say they'd buy the Mac Pro and use it for 10 years, we've only been able to stretch out the lives of our classic Mac Pros because there was absolutely zero competition in the CPU market. Intel was happy to keep tick tocking 4 cores for the mainstream and did nothing in the HEDT space so our 12 core MPs lasted forever. AMD have kicked down the doors with Ryzen, Threadripper and EPYC and there's going to be an almighty CPU war again. You throw $15k at the Mac Pro in the Fall and by Spring 2020 you're going to feel an epic case of buyers remorse. By this time next year this shiny new cheese grater is going to look unbelievably dated when workstations costing a fraction are running PCIe4, nVidia's 7nm GPUs, much faster SSDs and 200 GigE networking.

I know Windows isn't as nice as MacOS but when push comes to shove I prefer more powerful hardware over a slightly better OS. All my software is cross platform and works the same on MacOS and Win it just works a heck of a lot faster. Of the artists I converse with on forums and on social media none is impressed with this Mac Pro so for a more balanced view I'd check out the Mac forums of the 3D community and see what less handpicked professionals think of Apple's latest white elephant.

UrbaneLegend said:

... Yes, Win10 is no MacOS but it is far from the nightmare of previous versions and for me the benefits of cheap powerful hardware trumps the OS every time. ...

For sure. If you can do w/o macOS as part of your regular workflow, go PC. Or, maybe a Mac and PC, and let the PC do the heavy lifting. But, if we want to do most of our work on/with macOS, then we're kind of stuck with what Apple gives us.

That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do to have the best of both worlds. I still have 2x Mac Pros, an iMac and MacBook Pro but they've become dust collectors in a very short time. I planned to do all 3D animation work on the PC and edit on the Mac side but the PC was so much faster at all media tasks, night and day faster, that I do all professional work on the PC. My Macs are relegated to iTunes and Twitter.

I thought I would hate Win10 but I don't, it's not quite as good or consistent as MacOS but I'm quite happy to make a small sacrifice on the OS to have access to hardware that is in a different league faster and at a fraction of the cost of the best Pro level Mac Apple can produce.

There is a malaise at Apple, we've seen it with botched MBP keyboards and now failing screens along with the scam of the i9 CPU option and charging $300 to have a CPU that cannot be cooled sufficiently to make it at all a worthwhile option. Apple is no longer the company that pulled me away from PCs in the first place.

I don't rule out buying Macs in the future but Apple are going to have to make an extremely compelling argument and it'll have to be more than a prettier OS.