As the lucky guy who got to review the 2013 Mac Pro, I’ve spent quite a bit of time with it over the past week. You can read that review for my formal evaluation of Apple’s new flagship workstation, but one thing that struck me while testing the Mac Pro is that in addition to radically changing Apple’s professional desktop line, it also illustrates the changing face of “power-user” computing for Mac users.
It wasn’t very long ago that the performance gap between consumer-level processors, such as those used in the iMac and MacBook lines, and the higher-end processors used by the Mac Pro line was vast. Affordable hard drives couldn’t yet provide the massive storage capacities we see today. And the performance of integrated GPUs (and even some consumer-level discrete GPUs) was relatively poor. As a result, if you wanted a really powerful computer, or one with a lot of storage, or one that could handle the latest games, you looked to the Mac Pro line—even if you never planned to work with video, perform 3-D rendering, or do scientific modeling. The Mac Pro, despite its name, was as much a computer for power users (including many performance-hungry home users) as it was for people doing “real”
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