David Pierce:
From a non-video perspective, the Mac Pro is in general very fast: once we switched the Sharp monitor’s refresh rate from 30Hz to 60Hz, absolutely everything felt smooth and fluid. (OS X is comically small on a 4K monitor, however.) The machine boots in a surprisingly slow 35 seconds, resumes from sleep very quickly, and it’s nearly always clear there’s plenty of power at your disposal while the Pro quietly hums along.
Two surprises here:
1) That it takes that long to boot — far longer than my MacBook Air.
2) That OS X isn’t yet better tailored for 4K monitors, despite that being a selling point of this machine.
Of course, the selling point of this machine is that it can power 4K monitors, but Apple doesn’t (yet) make one of these, so maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised at this oversight. I suspect 2014 will see Apple remedy both of these things: an OS X that is 4K-ready and a 4K display for this Mac Pro.
The real question: will the iMac be able to go 4K this year under the “retina” moniker? I imagine that it’s a slam dunk that the MacBook Air will get a retina upgrade this year, but is it still too cost prohibitive for its consumer-class brother with a far larger screen?
As all the Mac Pro reviews have made very clear, this device is not consumer-class given its price, so I imagine Apple has far more wiggle room here to release a large retina display at an even larger price point.
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