The Verge’s Mac Pro Review

Nilay Patel:

So to get this right, we needed to find a configuration that is broadly representative of what pro users might actually buy, allows us to investigate Apple’s performance claims, and hopefully reveals something interesting about what pro users might experience if they upgrade to this machine. And we needed to do all of this knowing that we wouldn’t just send this machine back when the review was done, like we do with every standard review unit. This one was going to be ours to keep.

Happily, we have a bit of an advantage: The Verge is part of Vox Media, a company full of media professionals who use a huge variety of software to work on everything from Netflix shows to print magazine design. And of course, The Verge’s own art and video teams make illustrations and motion graphics for our site and YouTube all day long. So we called in a few friends, let everyone use the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR to work on their various projects, and had them report back.

Excellent review, including the video.

The bottom-line takeaway is a bit ironic. The big problem with the previous Mac Pro is that it didn’t have a thermal design that could handle GPU-intensive computing. The new Mac Pro does, but a lot of pro apps — particularly Adobe’s — aren’t optimized for offloading computation to the GPU.

Update: One other takeaway — the head-to-head comparison with a Threadripper-based PC shows that AMD is kicking Intel’s ass in high-end workstation performance.

★ Monday, 2 March 2020