For the last three years, Apple has been criticized a great deal for not upgrading their Mac Pro line in a more-timely fashion. This caused many of their pro customers to move away from the Mac and to other workstation class systems from HP, Dell and others.
Early this week, Apple responded to this criticism by introducing a new Mac Pro that includes a new XEON processor from Intel, as well as extremely powerful graphics cards from AMD through their VEGA line of graphics processors and boards. This Mac Pro has been in the design labs for close to three years and is now ready for its debut.
The new Mac Pro features powerful Xeon processors up to 28 cores, with 64 PCI Express lanes for exceptional performance and massive bandwidth. It also provides over 300W of power along with a state-of-the-art thermal architecture to allow the processor to run entirely unconstrained all the time.
Apple chose AMD's Radeon Pro 580X for the base model graphics card and an option for AMD's Radeon Pro Vega II Duo, which features two Vega GPUs that delivers up to 28 teraflops of graphics performance and 64 gigabytes of memory. From a technical standpoint, the Mac Pro is one of the most powerful workstations on the market and sets Apple up to be more than competitive with the current offering from competitors.
The new Mac Pro emphasizes that the Mac is still an essential product for Apple, and they can still innovate at the highest levels. It also helps fulfill a key goal of Apple Co-Founder, Steve Jobs. A day after Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, I met with him to try and get a sense of how he was going to help turn Apple around. I asked him directly what his top priority would be. He said that while he was away, Apple forgot about their core customers. These were the folks that helped put the Mac on the map and included engineers, graphic designers, desktop publishers, and those who needed more powerful tools to do their specific type of technically driven jobs.
At the time, Apple was about $1 billion in the red and needed a way to help Apple win customers back. Within weeks of Jobs being on the job, he ordered the engineers to create more powerful Macs and, within a year, Apple was back in favor with their core customers and this was one of the reasons Apple started turning itself around.
Interestingly, there was one type of core customer that embraced the Mac from the beginning. That was Hollywood. The Mac found its way to Hollywood initially through its desktop publishing emphasis and was adopted by Hollywood's marketing departments to create all types of marketing material, including posters and handouts to promote movies. Before the Mac, this was mostly done by hand or on special graphics workstations that were extremely expensive.
As Hollywood graphics designers started using it for marketing purposes, they discovered that the Mac could also be used for pre and post production purposes in actual TV and movie projects too. Apple gained serious notoriety from the Hollywood crowd, and then Apple CEO, John Scully, turned his engineers loose to create even more powerful Macs that could help Hollywood create more magic.
George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic company began using Macs and very soon, every major movie studio and video outlet brought Macs into their shops to help with many phases of TV and movie production.
Unfortunately, the Mac fell on hard times in Hollywood after Sculley left Apple and future CEOs tried to make the Mac more like traditional PCs and shifted its designs to focus more towards IT and consumers. This pushed Hollywood away from the Macs and to PCs that had gained more power and evolved into graphics workstations in their own right.
Once Jobs gained control of Apple, more powerful Macs began to emerge, and Hollywood started to take notice again. The Mac again started to hold its own with PC workstations, although competitors gained so many inroads into Hollywood during Steve Jobs absence from Apple that Apple has had some trouble gaining a lot of ground on competitors over the last decade.
In talks with my Hollywood friends since this new Mac Pro was announced, it is clear that the new Mac Pro hit a real nerve in Hollywood. This product has the chance to help Apple gain ground on competitors in this critical, creative market segment. I can't help thinking that this new Mac Pro is the dream machine Steve Jobs might have envisioned when he came back to Apple in 1997.
Besides the upgraded power that the Mac Pro delivers, the addition of the high-resolution 6K monitor called the Pro Display XDR that Apple introduced, gives movie creators a powerful video editing workstation at relatively low costs compared to competitive products. This monitor, priced at $4,999, delivers the same functionality of specialty monitors costing up to $43,000 each that gives video editors an exact view of what would be the final visual once edited and available to the public.
Movie producers need to have these types of systems on site to get immediate feedback of a particular shoot. In the past, they would get the raw video and then send it to a proxy system that could take many hours to render to deliver the kind of image quality that could then be shown on a $43,000 monitor. Now they have a complete system in the Mac Pro and the Pro Display XDR Monitor and can ditch the proxy procedure and see the highest quality film footage immediately. This could save Hollywood millions of dollars in the pre and post-production process.
The Mac Pro and the Pro Display XDR will be welcomed by many types of engineering driven programs that demand high powered workstations, including architects, oil and gas exploration, 3D imaging, and many others.
But this product will do more to rekindle Apple's love affair with Hollywood that started decades and ago and will be a strategic product for Apple to make its core customers happy again.
