Apple's 2019 Mac Pro Defines the Modular Workstation

Apple’s redesigned Mac Pro (Late 2019) defines what a modular workstation is. With a chassis that is based on flexibility and utility, Apple has done away with the cylindrical form factor of the 2013 Mac Pro and brought back the tower design that was used from 2006-2012. However, while the Mac Pro tower has returned, this new rendition is anything but ordinary. Apple built a system that can change as your needs do, giving users a great amount of control over the assembly and components of their final build, thanks to an aluminum housing that vertically lifts off to provide 360° access to the system’s interior. If there were a picture in the dictionary next to the term “workstation,” there would be a picture of the Mac Pro, because it has the power to tackle tasks including non-GPU intensive applications, video editing, 3D content creation, photo retouching, multi-GPU pro applications, GPU rendering, machine learning, particle simulations, and more.

There are two main components of the Mac Pro that place it in its own class of workstation. The first is Apple’s Afterburner, a PCIe x16 ProRes and ProRes RAW hardware accelerator card for Final Cut Pro X, QuickTime Player X, and supported third-party apps. Unique to the Mac Pro, Afterburner allows you to go straight from the camera to a timeline and work natively with 4K and 8K files, all without needing to transcode video or create proxy workflows. With a frame rate of 30 fps, the Afterburner card supports up to three streams of 8K ProRes RAW, up to 12 streams of 4K ProRes RAW, and up to 16 streams of 4K ProRes 422, meaning you can free up your CPU cores to enable even more creative effects and processing.