 There's a lot to unpack after Apple's WWDC 2019 keynote, but the biggest one for us was obviously the new Mac Pro. Now, it's not often that Apple admits they were wrong, but that's essentially what happened yesterday, after five long years of waiting for professional users who simply weren't happy with the trash can. So, let's take a closer look at it and see if we should be excited, or if we should stay far, far away. You know what you shouldn't stay far away from? Our sponsor, iFixit. Ever wonder why you're always missing a screw when you put something back together? iFixit's magnetic project mat will keep you organized and keep your screws in place. Check it out at the link below. So, right out of the great, there's a bunch of, well, great things, sorry, I'll stop that now, about the new Mac Pro that I really have to give Apple credit for. First up is their use of a mostly standard, and even more importantly, reconfigurable tower design. According to Apple's figures, it's got a ton of cooling capacity, it's extremely easy to open, and open it you will, because it's also got a ton of expandability. That's right, count them, my friends, that is eight. PCI Express X16 slots, with four of them being double width, and it's also got 12 RAM slots, supporting up to one and a half terabytes of six-channel DDR4 memory. And on top of the seriously impressive amount of internal expansion, you get a pair of front Thunderbolt 3 ports, with more of those on the back, as well as dual 10 gigabit Ethernet network ports. Whew! But, let's slow down for a second, and break it down a bit, starting with the cooling. Both the CPU and the GPU coolers are passive in this design, meaning that Apple is relying on direct airflow from the three chassis fans at the front of the tower. Now, that's kind of unorthodox, but it's also not unexpected, after Apple's emphasis on decoupling their active coolers, and their passive heat sinks on the trashcan Mac Pros. And, if it works, then well, that's really cool. The only rub that we have right now, is that there's no mention anywhere of filtration, which means that if there isn't any, and so far Apple does not have a great track record for this, dust is gonna get sucked in, and it's gonna settle on the components over time, hurting cooling. Making matters worse, it's impossible to tell right now how good of a seal is made with the outer fascia. So, the sides might also be a point of ingress for dust and debris, as well as potential sources of noise escaping the chassis. With that said, the ease of opening the new Mac Pro, will make it a much more trivial task to clean, compared to traditional Apple products, so all this might end up being a total non-issue. On the subject of opening it up, let's talk about the expansion slots. The only really obvious gotcha here, is that the top most slot is limited in length by the CPU cooler, but if you dig a little deeper, you will find some more. With the Radeon Pro Vega 2 GPU option, the passive cooler or coolers, you can have up to two of those, are so large that they obstruct their adjacent PCIe slots, in spite of the double spacing. So that's gonna drop you down to six, or four other available slots, depending on your config. So there is another compromise in utility, for the sake of keeping all of the internal cooling passive. It's not all bad though, because those same Apple stock GPUs, come on a new extended PCIe slot design, that they're calling Mac Pro expansion or MPX for short. It's basically like two PCI Express slots, lined up right next to each other. Now the front of the slot, the PCIe 16x part hasn't been modified, so you can actually install anything that you want in there. But that raises the question, what's the rest of it for? So apparently it's for power delivery, that means up to a total of 500 watts per card, with no messy cabling, and routing display port connections, to the internal Thunderbolt ports. Now something that's nice, is that if you'd rather install a non-Apple card, there are actually auxiliary eight pin PCIe power cables, which give you up to 375 watts per slot, just like a normal PC. Honestly, that's pretty thoughtful of Apple, even though they still haven't made nice with Nvidia. Something that might have saved them the trouble of, engineering an FPGA to accelerate video decoding. You know, just pop an RTX in there, right? Anyway, until that happens, the afterburner card will actually handle offloading, up to three 8K ProRes raw streams, or 12 4K ones from the CPU. So in fairness to Apple, that is pretty sick. But we'd still really like to see them, get on patching things up with Nvidia, because as nice as those dual Vega 2 options are, they're not comparable to Titans or Quadros. Or are they? Actually, there's a huge amount of capability here, and we're pretty excited about these GPUs, because a couple of them, combined with AMD's ultra-fast Infinity Fabric, offer nearly as much bandwidth as Nvidia's NVLink, as we've seen on their RTX series of GPUs. And since there are no multi-GPU, single RTX boards available right now, and NVLink can currently only combine two workstation cards, that means that the dual Vega 2 cards, if you have two of them, with a total of four 32 gig frame buffers, are the only way to achieve the massive 128 gigs of combined VRAM that Apple has assembled here. So for professional rendering or animation workloads, while an artist could throw four Titan RTX cards, or four Quadro RTX 8000s, they still wouldn't have as much combined memory, making the upcoming Mac Pro the only non-enterprise solution for working on positively massive scenes in professional rendering or huge data sets for GPGPU tasks, and much more than that. Oh, and all of this is with HBM2 memory for even faster access times than GDDR6. Like I'm really looking forward to seeing the numbers for these monsters. Not that I'm sure which monster exactly to order, Apple's spec sheet for the new Mac Pro also has a lot to unpack, because it's pretty weird, and we're not sure how to interpret some of it. So first up is the four memory sticks on the 32 gig spec machine. Is that because they're just gonna leave a couple slots empty and you can fill them yourself? Or is it something else? Are they using multiple motherboards for the Mac Pro, with LGA3647 on the high end with six channel memory, and then LGA2066 with quad channel memory on the lower end? Actually, for that matter, why even have a low end? Why do they need the 16 core and below SKUs as long as the iMac Pro exists? Or even just, I don't know, at all. By the time you're spending that much money, why would you do that? It's probably the second most perplexing thing about this whole announcement, is the base model with its eight core 16 thread CPU that I guess would be some kind of variant of a Xeon W2145-ish, which is far from a professional level CPU in the face of consumer chips that have that many cores running at much higher clock speeds. It's one of those scenarios where the only real advantage to this Pro product is ECC memory support and AVX512 instruction set support, which I guess also brings me to, I wonder why Apple didn't leverage their relationship with AMD for access to their Threadripper or Epic lineup of CPUs instead. It could be that there's an exclusivity agreement, or it also could be that they've just had this design in the works for so long, that Threadripper wasn't a feasible option yet. It's hard to say right now, but we would like to find out for you guys before we work on our review later this year. For now, let's change gears from the Mac Pro to the accompanying new Pro Display XDR. This thing is an absolute beast. I guess at $5,000 it better be, but man, it ticks all the boxes short of high refresh rate. We've got 6K resolution, 10-bit color, factory calibration, proofing modes in standard def, HD, P3, HDR, sRGB, and more, 1,000 nits sustained brightness with a peak of 1,600 nits. I mean, guys, this monitor for pro work, yes. And it's just over an inch thick with a nine millimeter bezel. Yeah, that's a bit thick, but like guys, you're also getting three USB type C ports and a magnetic latch mount for the Pro Stand or Avesa mount, which are both sold separately. This is, I don't think I'm the only one who feels like at $5,000 for this display, Apple shouldn't be nickel-ing and diming like this. The Avesa mount adapter will be $199 and the Pro Stand $999. And like the Mac Pro, they'll all be available in the fall. Though in fairness, it's not really nickels and dimes we're talking about here. The monitor doesn't seem to come with a stand at all. And the Pro Stand is a whopping $1,000 for a stand. Thank goodness it includes the cleaning cloth because Lord only knows what they'd want for that. I guess this leads us pretty well into the other thing that I've got to address. Apple's had this pattern for a while now that their computers actually aren't all that expensive compared to piecing together the exact same spec list for yourself. Yeah, you might not make the same hardware choices. So there's definitely ways that you can save a buck compared to buying a Mac, but all things considered, most base model Macs, to say nothing of the high cost for upgrades, haven't been that big of a ripoff. Well, I wish I could say the same thing here, but unfortunately from what I can tell, Apple's decided to throw that informal tradition to the wind this time around and charge an extortionate $6,000 for the base level Mac Pro. Now that wouldn't be a problem if it had the horses to back it up. But just to recap, that $6,000 Mac Pro is an eight core 16 thread CPU, a pedestrian 32 gigs of RAM, a 256 gig SSD, what year is it? And a Radeon 580X. Sorry, I think it's a Radeon Pro 580X, isn't it? Okay, sorry, excuse me. Even so, we can do some paper math here. So Xeon W2145, four eight gig sticks of ECC memory, a high gig 256 gig NVMe SSD. Like we're looking at about $3,200 all in. So is a system bristling with Thunderbolt 3 ports and running Mac OS worth nearly a $3,000 markup? Let's put this into perspective. This is Apple's most expensive Mac Pro ever. The G5 started at two grand, the 2009 Mac Pro was 2,300 and the trash can started at $3,000. Even adjusting for inflation, it's nearly double the price. I mean, maybe Apple needs to make back their R&D. No, definitely Apple needs to make back their R&D, but part of me wonders if they just cynically think that the people who want these are gonna buy them at any price anyway. I hope for Apple's sake that they're right, since given their usual upgrade pricing, the top spec one is unlikely to be a better value option. So the baseline price for a Mac Pro setup with the Pro Display XDR is gonna be $11,000, 12,000 if you wanna stand for your display. So we're gonna buy one, but it won't be until we've spent some time with it that we can draw any sort of conclusion about whether it's actually worth the price. We do have some guesses though. Speaking of guesses, you probably guessed this was coming. Our segue to our sponsor, Squarespace. We use Squarespace, no joke, we actually use it. Both our linusmediagroup.com and ltxexpo.com websites were built quickly using Squarespace, and if you haven't heard already, Squarespace is an all-in-one platform that makes it easy to get your website up and running quickly. You can choose from tons of different templates and just find the one that makes the most sense for your project and run with it. If you trip while you're running, Squarespace offers webinars, a full series of help guides, and you can even contact their 24-7 support team to help you build their site. So go, their site, your site. So go to squarespace.com forward slash ltt and get 10% off today. So thanks for watching guys. 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