What's the point of a Mac Pro?

[Envergure]

The new Mac Pro is pretty impressive. It can have up to 4 GPUs, 4TB of storage and I think 32 GB of RAM. It also comes with eight cores standard.
Now, what would anyone want all that for? Gaming is out (because it's a Mac), and that's the only thing I can come up with to justify the nearly-$3000 starting price.

 

[vnf4ultra]

Video editing, photoshop, CAD work, design. There are many good uses. I would say the majority go to video editing/production and professional design work. It's basically a "workstation" type system, not really a standard desktop system, as evidenced by the dual socket xeon supporting motherboard, SAS drives(option), and quadro video cards(option).

P.S. Just because it's a mac, does not mean gaming is out. There are quite a few hot games ported to mac(battlefield 2142, need for speed carbon, command and conquer 3, madden 08, tiger woods 08, unreal tournament 2k4, call of duty 4) and also the intel based macs can run windows too (at full speed, no emulation), so it can run windows games just fine when windows is installed.

 

[Julio Franco]

vnf4ultra pretty much covers it, the Mac Pro is aimed at the workstation market not the end consumer. It's also quite beneficial that Apple hardware can run Windows nowadays, even when mac purists may argue they don't need it anyway

 

[SNGX1275]

Yep, vnf4ultra's post pretty much covered it all. You don't run a machine in Jan 2008 with those specs without having good reason to, and I'm sure your 'good reason' isn't Bioshock. When you own a system like that, you KNOW what you need it for, and you have the financial backing to do so. People don't just buy those systems for fun and Apple doesn't just sell them for fun.

 

[captaincranky]

Once upon a time......

The new Mac Pro is pretty impressive. It can have up to 4 GPUs, 4TB of storage and I think 32 GB of RAM. It also comes with eight cores standard.
Now, what would anyone want all that for? Gaming is out (because it's a Mac), and that's the only thing I can come up with to justify the nearly-$3000 starting price.

The NSA declared the Mac G-3 (or maybe the G-4) a WEAPON, and it's export was banned. Apple shamelessly seized on this and built an advertising campaign around it. Shame on you Apple, and shame on you too Steve Jobs!

Apple has been a mainstay of the photo and movie editing trade for some time, in large part because of it's color management system "color synch". That has changed somewhat of late. Apples "Final Cut Pro" is (allegedly) superior to Adobe's "Premier Pro" as a movie editor, but I can't say from my own experience. That was also a few years ago.

Besides, some computers have to work for a living, they don't d*** around playing games all day. Consider Google's servers. Consider the editing workstations at ILM. Consider the servers at Newegg. If they go down, where will you buy lights to make your computer special.

OK, I give up. What is the difference between a tool and a toy, do you know?

 

[Didou]

I'm sure the people at Pixar use exclusively Mac Pros.