New Mac Pro Gives Apple More Business Gravitas

When we last had a new Mac Pro in PCMag Labs for review back in 2010, our lead desktop and laptop analyst, Joel Santo Domingo, called it "nominally a workstation-class PC." Yes, it was fast and had some business-y features. However, for those of us who review and cover mostly only business technology, the Mac Pro was still kind of a big yawn.

But as an analyst covering the business space, the new Apple Mac Pro was the announcement from Tuesday's Apple event that I found most exciting. Apple is now offering a true business-class workstation (at a hefty price) that can likely edge out the need for a dedicated server in Mac-heavy small business networks and workgroups.

First, you have the great hardware specs. Dual Ethernet Gigabit ports for connection redundancy, multihoming, or link aggregation, is one example. The Mac Pro processor specs can be configured from a 3.7GHz quad core to a 2.7GHz 12-core. Memory is scalable up to 64GB of 1866MHz DDR3. Beefing up the performance are specs such as dual graphics processors and plenty of expansion options: and not just with Apple's proprietary Thunderbolt, but with four USB 3.0 ports. Apple also includes next-gen Wi-Fi 802.11.ac, which when used with one of the now many 802.11ac Wi-Fi routers on the market, provides significant gains in signal speed and range.

So, on the hardware side, the new Mac Pro looks good from a small to mid-sized business usage perspective. With the new Mavericks OS and its business features such as support for the SMB network file system (for integration with Windows systems); RAID (0, 1, 10); a virtual file stack for accessing various file systems such as NTFS; Active Directory, and LDAP support — just to name a few — you are looking at a complete small business server that should suit the needs of many organizations.

Add to Mavericks running on the new Mac Pro the updated OS X Server app, and you have even more business functionality: DHCP, DNS, Xsan, and more.

Before you jump all over my praise of the new Mac Pro as truly business-worthy or ask me how much Cupertino paid me to write this, let me state: this is still not the ideal hardware/software combination for enterprise usage, large networks, heavy database transactions, or any datacenters that need to support hybrid clouds or virtualized environments.

And, of course, this is all speculation on my part. We can't definitely state anything about performance until we get the just-announced hardware into PCMag Labs for testing (and we will).

So, yes, let's not get ridiculous about the new Mac Pro's business potential. But as we saw with some of the serious business features that were delivered to iOS 7, Apple is taking steps to shore up its products' business gravitas.

For more, check out PCMag's Hands On With the New Apple Mac Pro and the video below.