In an effort to stem the narrative that it no longer cares about professional users, Apple last week announced that it’s busy working on new hardware designed specifically for developers and creative professionals. Most notably, Apple said that it was finally going to revamp the Mac Pro, a machine it essentially let sit idle for more than three years.
“With regards to the Mac Pro,” Phil Schiller said to select tech outlets last week, “we are in the process of what we call completely rethinking the Mac Pro’. We’re working on it. We have a team working hard on it right now, and we want to architect it so that we can keep it fresh with regular improvements, and we’re committed to making it our highest-end, high-throughput desktop system, designed for our demanding pro customers.”
Predictably, Apple re-committing to the Mac Pro was music to the ears of many pro users who, for quite some time now, have felt abandoned by the company. And though Apple rolled out a new MacBook Pro late last year, even that was widely met with a tepid response from users who viewed the machine as overpriced and under-powered.
While Apple’s new Mac Pro may not see the light of day until 2019, that hasn’t stopped pro users from theorizing about what their dream machine would look like. Recently, Justin Williams penned an interesting post on Carpeaqua detailing what his ideal next-gen Mac Pro would offer up to users.
Now to be fair, Williams is a software developer, which is to say his personalized wish-list might vary a bit from what, say, a video editor or research scientist might be hoping for, but Williams’ list nonetheless provides us with an interesting jumping off point.
On the CPU front, Williams explains why he’s really looking for more cores.
In terms of speed, the reality is that I haven’t been hamstrung by CPU performance in years. What I need more than faster CPUs is more cores. The trash can Mac Pro got this right. My iMac maxes out at 4-cores. I’m going to want at least 8 for a Mac Pro. Anything more than that seems overkill for me personally, but I can appreciate others might need 12 or more.
What will I use 8 cores for? Parallelizing my compilation in hopes of speeding it up.
Remember the brouhaha surrounding Apple’s 2016 MacBook Pro not featuring DDR4 RAM? Well, with a new Mac Pro on the horizon, Williams already has his eyes set on DDR5 RAM.
I know you all love DDR3, but DDR5 is a thing now… If I’m going to buy a new tower that I expect to last for several years, I’m going to need at least 64GB of RAM. I’d take more if possible though!…
What am I using all this RAM for? I don’t necessarily need it for building my app in Xcode, but when you add the virtual machines I run in Parallels for testing, Docker containers, and how the dozens of tabs I keep open at any given time it adds up.
Make sure to check out Williams’ full post for a well-reasoned and lengthy rundown of what the Mac Pro of the future may or should look like. It’s been a long time since the notion of a new Mac Pro was even a possibility, so now, more than ever, it’s fun to sit back and conjure up dream scenarios.
