Apple's 2019 Mac Pro: The Ultimate Photo Workstation and Digital Darkroom

In developing the Mac Pro (Late 2019), Apple has unveiled a true digital darkroom for photographers with intensive imaging needs. Perhaps your photo workflow involves a Lightroom library that is tens of terabytes in size and spans multiple RAID arrays, or you’re working with large raw files from the cameras such as the Sony a7R IV or FUJIFILM GFX 100. Maybe you’re digitizing 35mm or 120 roll film, or large-format sheet film with an optical resolution of 8000 dpi, and then importing these files into Photoshop to apply filters and other effects. To top things off, you use two, three, or four displays simultaneously. While tasks like these may seem daunting for any other system, the Mac Pro can do this all before breakfast, and still get the kids to school on time. Let’s take a look under the hood of the Mac Pro and see just how it accomplishes this.

With its return to a fully modular design, the Mac Pro gives users a great amount of control over the assembly and components of its final build. As with any system, the ultimate configuration of your Mac Pro will depend on needs that are based on the type of photo work you do. Since we’re talking about photography, we’ll discuss the GPU options first, and to this end, Apple offers a few different graphics configurations.