....but I would like to hear from anyone that is considering a MacPro .
Roger
I personally think that the new Mac Pro is wonderful ... so many good design elements ... really hard for me to fault.
For a number of years the criticism of Apple was not enough innovation technical prowess and the majority of their line
was made for lower end users who valued style over computing power. SO ... they release a very expensive tower that can
be scaled to extreme levels and the concern is they were not cost conscious enough.
My take on the computer is from the perspective of one who at this point does video more than photo ... and of one who
has a long-term relationship with a Mac Pro. I have a mid-2010 model that has seen more upgrades than I care to mention,
some of them necessitated by the running feud between Apple and nVidia. But the computer after 9 years has not missed a beat,
and has been extremely reliable ... worth every cent I have spent on it.
However, Apple in their wisdom have locked it out of Catalina as an upgrade path and it has older IO ... not thunderbolt and only pci-e 2 slots.
So at some point I will have to make a change ... Windows is a distant still unpleasant memory ... in fact whenever I boot up Parallels my
Win 10 OS spends the majority of its time downloading another set of non-ending security upgrades.
My machine started as a dual Quad core 2.4 with 16Gb of ram and a small HD. I now have dual 6core 3.46 overclocked Xeon processors and 96GB of ram.
1Tb SSD for the OS 2Tb SSD on a pci-e card for scratch disk and temporary space to render files, 12Tb internal drives and 20TB external drives. QNAP NAS with 14TB
for archiving data in duplicate with the external drives.Dell 5K monitor,which I run at 3840x2160 as the fonts are barely legible at that resolution. I color calibrate the monitor
every couple of months but the drift is minimal. Without the great ability to be upgraded I would probably have had three machines at this point ... probably spent a bit more
in the process of buying new repeatedly.
I like the tower so much that I recently put a racing stripe on it:
Actually I had to painter's tape the door as the latch mechanism gave out due to upgrades and maintenance ... I vacuum and blow it out regularly. When the latch failed
the door was frozen on ... it also locks all the internal drives and pci-e slots.
So very long story but the short of it is that over 9 years the overall cost has been worth the initial investment. I project that the new Mac Pro will be similarly long - term
and has great potential for expansion as needed or desired.
The major caveat is that the base processor is a dead end choice in that the memory runs more slowly than any other processor so the 12 core is bare minimum. Memory and GPU
should probably be lowest spec ... add OWC memory at a later date. Biggest SSD may not be a good thing ... medium size and limit it to the OS and essentials ... clone it to another
similar SSD. The two GPU card would be a great choice in a year of so for anyone doing a lot of video rendering. Less so for stills.
I will personally stick with my Dell monitor ... or an Eizo as both are 10bit and can be color calibrated.
Like all things Apple ... six months might be a good amount of time to wait ... let others beta test all the small issues that tend to crop up in a system that is so different from their other
machines.
Sure a AMD Ryzen or Threadripper build would smoke the Mac Pro ... but dealing with all the Windows issues is not something I would choose ... when the Mac OS has been so relatively stable
at this point in time.
Nice to have choices!