Mac Pro's future

[ImaNihilist]

I work in the creative field. We've got tons of old Mac Pros laying around this office, and a few new ones in the production room. The reality is that the MacBook Pro has pretty much replaced the Mac Pro in the creative field for almost everything except the most hardcore rendering.

The biggest draw to the Mac Pro for daily use was that you could give it a lot of RAM and run multiple displays. That's all possible now with the MacBook Pro. Transcoding is more efficient (and cheaper) with dedicated hardware than it is on the CPU. There are very few applications or workflows that actually need what the Mac Pro offers. The Mac Pro is pretty much exclusively for someone who needs more than 4 cores of CPU power and more than 16GB of memory. There aren't a lot of workflows or applications that reach into that space, and those that do are often better of just offloading that processing to dedicated hardware. You can throw $5,000 worth of Xeon cores at H.264 encoding, or you can just buy a $150 USB hardware encoder. Even PCIe cards can now run externally over Thunderbolt.

I've worked with a number of startups and iOS app developers and I don't know of a single person who uses a Mac Pro for development. All MacBooks or iMacs. The only people I know who use Mac Pros are creative production folks, and it's mostly for the multiple displays. Only a single person in our office actually uses the horsepower for video.