It's been over a year since I got my $15,000 Mac Pro, and now I can officially say that Apple
screwed the Pro’s once again, and I don’t think they even care. To be honest, I think they gave up
on the Mac Pro less than a year after its release, and In this video I’ll let you know how and why.
And to add to that, Yes, I do think that even though the Mac Pro is a very powerful and
capable machine, it's officially a failure, and it’s very hard for me to recommend to
people who I consult for, that actually need the performance that only it can provide in a mac,
and that can afford to drop 10 to 20,000 dollars on a machine.
Before we jump into the 3 biggest reasons It’s failed,
why you should be careful buying one, and what you should buy instead if you
need a powerful machine, let's touch on Apple's previous failure, the trashcan.
Everybody was shocked when Apple showed off the Mac Pro cylinder,
and phil schiller proudly boasted on their achievements and innovation
A lot of people including me were very sceptical of the price points and design, but Apple tried to
assure people that they would have upgrades as the graphics cards could be swapped
out to newer models and the CPU was socketed, and the thermal core design was groundbreaking
allowing the Pro to run cool and silent, and that external expansion was the future.
With that, a fair bit of Pro’s ended up giving it a shot, including a much younger
me 7 years ago when I was just a few years into my photography and filmmaking career.
I was working a basic full time job and building up my business on the side,
and ended up taking out a $6000 loan to buy myself the black cylinder,
which back then was a much bigger chunk of my income then than this $15,000 Mac Pro is now.
And you know what, it wasn’t a mistake. Paired with Final Cut Pro it allowed
me to edit way faster than my custom PC that cost less and had way better specs,
and It ended up being a fantastic investment for my growing business and made me money.
While it did eventually fail because Apple didn’t ever update it, even 5 years later, for the first
few years it was very very powerful, and although Apple later admitted its mistakes and now went
back to a fully upgradable design, I’m not sure it actually matters and I’ll explain why.
Fast forward 6 years, and on the surface Apple gave us everything we asked for. We
had this gorgeous all aluminum cheese grater esk design. We had tons of ram and ssd’s capacity,
crazy CPU’s, a bunch of PCI slots so we can upgrade as we please, and even use
third party parts and accessories instead of being locked in, and yes even $700 wheels.
I was all about this Pro machine for a few reasons. First off, my previous mac pro was
a great investment but it was all locked down so it didn’t last long term, but this one promised to
fix all those issues. With all of the ports and support for easy third party upgrades,
it reminded be of the much loved cheesegrater Mac Pro’s that many people still use today,
but this Mac solved the biggest issues people had, for example having a 1400 Watt power supply
so it could handle anything you threw at it which is why the base price cost so much.
And finally, the pure performance of the system smoked anything else that was out
at the end of last year. Not only was the CPU performance a good step up from all other macs,
but the graphics performance was absolutely off the charts
and this score is before driver optimizations for the vega ii.
For example, it exported red footage in almost half the time than my iMac Pro,
and ProRes raw files in ⅓ of the time which was insane. Of course that's just exporting,
but When It came to actual playback performance it killed the other macs being the only machine
that could handle raw c200 files in multi-cam. It was also the only computer I’ve ever see
that could export this footage in real time with optimized software .
Now I mostly work with video, but this machine was also an
absolute beast for photo editing, being 2-3 times faster than my other macs.
You might say that should be the case since it's so expensive, and your right,
but it actually provided a good value because not only was it faster than a high end iMac Pro,
it was actually cheaper than one even with a display and extras factored in,
and you could upgrade it as you please.
Now I was very bullish on this machine, but not everyone was. People had a few issues with it
right off the bat. First of of course the price was astronomical, with a base price of $6000 which
included an 8 core processor, 32GB of RAM, 256GB of SSD and an RX580 based graphics card which
was embarrassing especially because you could get that level of performance for half of that
in an iMac at the time, and that included a 5K display, keyboard, mouse, and decent speakers.
I called Apple out on their base price in a video, showing that Mac Pro’s have always
cost about $3000 base price when adjusted for inflation until this machine came out
at 6, but even then you had to spend about 10,000 to make it a
decent value so it became unaffordable for most small business owners and freelancers.
But what people were really concerned about was the CPU being a socket that
would be outdated quickly, possibly never having an upgrade path with new CPU’s,
and the fact that the PCI slots were PCI express 3
which was the same tech in the 2013 trashcan pro, not PCIe 4 which is already on the market.
But a year later those things haven’t really made an impact on the machine,
or even the competition, what made the Mac Pro a failure was Apple themselves, and here's how:
Now the most obvious and painful one is Apple Silicon which I’ll talk about in just a sec
but there are two more things that have really hurt it which I want to cover first.
The first is lack of additional parts or upgrades. A few months before the Mac Pro’s release, AMD
put out their new 5700XT. I was expecting Apple to work with AMD and offer this card, but nope it was
either the weak base 580 or spending another $2400 for a decent usable graphics card, the vega II,
Surely Apple would offer it soon after since they work directly with AMD
and know ahead of time wich GPU’s are in the pipeline, but nope.
It took a 6 months after AMD publicly announced that card for an apple’s version to be released,
which Is probably a year or more after apple knew of that GPU.
And that's just the start. As you know the Mac Pro can use third party graphics cards,
so why not just buy a 5700XT and use it. We’ll we did, but the performance was really,
really, lacking, coming in slower than the base GPU or even a $2500 iMac.
Thats because Apple wasn’t updating the drivers for the graphics card, and only had a buggy first
release available for close to 8 months which is crazy. If you didn't know, Apple has taken over
all control over GPU drivers so AMD can’t simply release their own optimized ones,
which is also why you can no longer use Nvidia graphics cards in newer versions of MacOS.
Because of their faulty driver, if you had one display connected the performance tanked,
but if you had 2 displays connected the ones that didn’t flake out from the 4
ports you could get almost twice the performance.
Now I understand that they want more control over the user experience and to focus on Metal
optimizations, but when it takes 8 months for the then to fix a simple bug in the driver,
and they only do so when they release their version of the graphics card,
that is a huge you know which finger to the pro users buying a $6000 machine.
Not only that, but their version of the 5700XT ends up performing on average 25%
better than buying a much cheaper third party card, where that same card under
windows is far more powerful and that's using openCL which scores lower than metal.
But it gets worse, that W5700X that Apple want you to buy shipped with its own driver issues causing
consistent crashed in many popular pro apps. Apple Promised a fix back in august, but it's been 7
months and people are still having the Issue. AMD has stated that its an issue with Apples drivers
that they can’t fix but Apple needs to, And its been almost a year since that card launched.
And lastly for graphics card, AMD’s powerful new 6000 series of graphics cards that were released
4 months ago are still not compatible with the Mac Pro, with users waiting on
each macOS beta release to hopefully get support or for Apple to release their version of the card.
Now I don’t know about you, but this isn’t what I was expecting when I got this machine a year ago.
Sure i may have tons of ports for upgrades, but if Apple is keeping everything so locked down
and not working on bug fixes, what is the point for this upgradable machine?
We also recently had a report that AMD May repurpose its Apple exclusive GPU’s into
cryptocurrency mining units, which makes it sound like Apple may be ditching AMD
and moving to its own graphics chips, and thats the only thing that can explain why
they are so behind on drivers updates and new parts for their super expensive custom machine.
And we now know that Apple is working on a new Mac Pro that will be about half the size and use
Apple CPU’s and GPU’s, Vadim did a video on this, and it will be an absolute beast in
performance with really good optimization and most likely a lower price as well,
bringing us back to a similar starting price to all the previous mac Pro’s adjust for inflation.
So with all of that, it seems like Apple almost gave up on the Mac Pro less than
a year after it launched, and we know its because Apple Silicon Macs are the future
even with the weakest Mac Mini which I compared to this $15,000 Mac Pro
where it stood up to and even beat the beat in many real world test.
Apple knows that their own chips are the future of Macs, and I think that's why they haven’t really
been focused on this mac Pro, and thanks to our tests and comparisons, a lot of you guys know
that as well which is probably why I haven’t been able to sell my Mac pro for for over 2 months now
even though its priced close to half off. No one wants to buy it, and I don’t blame them..
So what should you buy if you need a powerful machine and you can’t wait for new M1X Macs
or Apple Silicon Mac Pro. If you’re looking for a new machine I think a 5K iMac with the 8 Core
Processor and whichever graphics you need is a great bang for the buck, or even better
if you can find a used imac Pro at a deep deep discount I think the prices will stay up fairly
well on those since they’ve already dropped so much and they won’t be making another one.
If you do need PCI slots or a bunch of GPU power and want to buy a Mac Pro,
try to find a discounted used one like mine instead of dropping $15,000 on a new one,
and when you’re ready to replace it you’ll loose a lot less money.
Overall, My question is, why would Apple even release this Mac Pro if they knew
that it would get slaughtered so quickly after its release and by apple itself
due to new cheaper, faster machines and them seemingly giving up on working on it.
To me its a huge bummer and even though it still performs great in many tasks,
it can’t help but feel that even though Apple finally made another modular pro machine
it doesn't’ really matter now, and apple once again screwed the Pro’s. But let me know
your thoughts down below, is the Mac Pro still worth it or should it have never been released?
Check out my comparison with the M1 Mac Mini right over there, click above to subscribe,
and I’ll see you in the next video.