Today was a solemn day at the DV Shop. A tear came to DVDude's eye as I stood at attention saluting the last Mac Pro, real Mac Pro, that we will ever sell. Apple has replaced this power house work horse that editors, colourists, DITs, DMTs and power users have come to love.
We thought it it would only be fair to give the real Mac Pro a nice send off service as we go into the the new age of cylindrical computing. The ability to beef up your tower with extra hard drives, capture cards, RAID controllers and additional optical drives ended today.
This signals the end of an Era from Apple. Since at least 1991, Apple has had a tower form factor computer system, expandable and upgradable. The Apple tower is gone. No longer can we add a PCIe card or swap out a hard drive or burn a disc. All these tasks will require some form of external device attached to the computer. The Mac Pro has become a hub, desks will be cluttered with peripherals and the clean sleek look will vanish as function will trump form.
It would be funny if someone ended up making a Thunderbolt expansion chassis that could hold the new Mac Pro, 4 Hard drives and 3 PCIe cards. It would be even funnier if it looked the the old Mac Pro, in fact I will be so bold as to predict that something like this will appear. It may come as a rack mount chassis or just a desktop box, but I think this will solve a lot of problems that people will have with the new Mac Pro. Make it so that you just need to replace the Mac Pro "core" when a newer faster unit comes out and upgrading won't be as taxing. Desks will remain clean and the threat of a feet tangling wire jungle will no longer haunt our nightmares.
But in the mean time, we salute the iconic "real" Mac Pro.
