 This is David with The Verge, and this is Apple's new Mac Pro. After years of seemingly neglecting the professional market, releasing virtually no new high-end hardware and even making its software more beginner-friendly at the expense of some established features and workflows, the Mac Pro has undergone a huge change. There's a new chassis, and I'll get to that, but ultimately it's what the Mac Pro does that matters. And inside this machine, for the base price of $2,999, is a quad-core 3.7 GHz Intel Xeon E5 processor, along with 12GB of RAM, two AMD Fire Pro D300 graphics chips, and 256GB of solid-state storage. Our review unit was upgraded to a 3GHz 8-core processor, 64GB of RAM, a 1TB solid-state drive, and AMD's Fire Pro D700 GPUs. Add in the 32-inch 4K Sharp Display Apple offers, and the Apple keyboard and Magic Mouse, and we're using $11,812 of Mac Pro. For the $8,099 price of this Pro alone, you could buy the highest-end iMac possible, stick it on the floor underneath your desk, and hook up that same Sharp 4K monitor, and save thousands of dollars. The Pro's black case is removable, letting you access a lot of the device's parts. You can swap out the solid-state hard drive, the GPUs, or upgrade the RAM all very easily, but they require seriously specific hardware. It's not nearly as expandable as the last-generation Pro, either. Apple made Thunderbolt for that. It'll mean a lot of messy desks next to the small tower, but it also makes moving devices and storage around a lot easier in most cases. This machine is clearly and explicitly made for people who work with video for a living. So we gave our Mac Pro to our video team, along with a red Epic camera, just to see how they felt. What they found, basically, was that the Mac Pro is the fastest, most impressive Mac ever. Sometimes. Especially if you also use Final Cut Pro X, which was able to play back four different 4K streams simultaneously with color correction on best performance mode, dropping few frames and looking really clean. In full resolution mode, there were noticeable drop frames, though. The new Final Cut Pro 10.1 is optimized to take advantage of those dual GPUs. They're really doing the heavy lifting here, and that makes the experience of using Final Cut feel extremely smooth on the Mac Pro. But for our video team, and frankly most video teams, that doesn't really matter. The Verge video crew uses Premiere Pro CC for editing, and in that case what the Mac Pro offers isn't quite so obvious. More than once a 2010 Mac Pro actually rendered videos faster than the new model. Up to 25% faster. Native, non-transcoded 4K red footage only played back smoothly at a quarter or a half of its native resolution. That seems to be because Premiere only uses the Mac Pro's CPU cores, not its GPUs, to handle video processing. Presumably, Adobe could update its apps to address this specific hardware, but until it does, Premiere on the Mac Pro is a story of diminishing returns. And in general, Premiere is the same experience it always is on any other machine, whether you're editing 1080p footage or 4K footage at half resolution. And once you're editing footage at that resolution, Premiere feels like it always has. The most obvious improvement in this year's Pro is the throughput. With fast solid state storage and fast RAM, the machine reads and writes insanely fast. A 30 second clip from a completely rendered timeline in Premiere, exported to a ProRes QuickTime in two seconds. When software is written to take advantage of the Pro's dual GPUs, it screams. That's why playing four streams of 4K video, raw from a red camera, is possible at all. But when it's not, it shows. Bioshock Infinite still stuttered at high settings and nearly 4K resolution. Its benchmark scores are spectacular, but the Pro can be a little underwhelming in surprising places. Of course, it's early, and Apple includes two GPUs on every Mac Pro for a reason, so that developers will take advantage. They almost certainly will, and a couple of apps already have, but until they do, the overall speed advantage of the Mac Pro over the last generation, or even a high-end iMac, isn't all that obvious. The most striking thing, maybe the only truly huge change here, is how the new Pro looks. Instead of a big, boxy silver rectangle, it's now an iridescent, obsidian gray cylinder with slits at the top and bottom. It's incredibly reflective, taking on the colors that surround it. At 9.9 inches tall, 6.6 inches in diameter, and about 11 pounds, the Pro is a hefty computer while still being infinitely more portable than the last model. It almost doesn't look like a computer, more like desk storage. Or I guess, a trash can. All that gives it away as a Mac Pro is the Apple logo on the back, which sits above the computer's many ports. On a single panel are four USB 3.0 ports, six Thunderbolt 2 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet jacks, speaker and headphone ports, and an HDMI port. Everything's on the back, which is nice looking, but it's also harder to access than before. There's a growing ecosystem of Thunderbolt accessories, and the Mac Pro is very much designed to be a hub for all your add-ons, not to have them all inside. What's inside the Mac Pro is what really counts, but there's no question Apple's done something remarkable here. The new Pro is small and light enough to be really easy to move around. You can fit four Mac Pros in the space of one old one, and in many cases that's really important. It's going to be a lot more friendly to crews that have to constantly move around on sets, or musicians that have to break down and move their rig every single night. It also runs really quietly, though it does get pretty warm as it pushes air out its top vents, and you really shouldn't cover its bottom or top slits so it can keep pushing air through. The new Mac Pro is, in a lot of ways, exactly what Pro's have been asking for. It's faster yet smaller, more powerful yet quieter. It has two GPUs, a fast processor, though it's not exactly a huge upgrade in that department, plenty of expandability thanks to Thunderbolt, and a pretty big bump for all things graphical. It's the fastest Mac yet in most ways, but it's not yet a revolution or a total game changer for anyone but the most space-conscious of video crews. It's a really good, really expensive, really cool-looking Mac that should get even better as developers start taking advantage of all its hardware. That's it. To some people, people who probably already know who they are, that's worth upwards of $3,000. But for others, including just about everyone on the Verge video team, they're not throwing out their iMacs and old Mac Pros just yet.