Apple's New Mac Pro

The new Mac Pro is an insanely powerful, expensive computer ($3,000 and up — way up). It’s designed for high-end tasks: video, photo and music editing, for example. Medical work. Scientific simulations. Designers
who want to connect five or six screens.And it has the most Applish design Apple has ever done. It’s an out-there, controversial, very brave trashing of everything we ever knew about desktop computer shapes.It’s not beige. It’s not plastic. It’s not even rectangular. Instead, it’s a small, silvery-black aluminum cylinder, about 10 inches tall and 6½ inches across, completely featureless except for a panel of connectors on the back.Ask people what they think this futuristic-looking object is, and you’ll hear a lot of “ashtray,” “vase,” “trash can” and “espresso machine.” Occasionally: “the love child of Darth Vader and R2-D2.”

In the typical obsessive Apple fashion, this computer doesn’t even have a power brick; the power transformer is concealed inside for sleeker looks. All that snakes out to the wall outlet is a single black cord. (It’s worth noting, too, that this computer is manufactured in the United States. No worries about Chinese sweatshops.)

With the slide of a lock switch on the back, you can lift the shell off of the Mac Pro, revealing the crazy sci-fi guts inside (and making it easy to install more memory).

But come on: a cylinder! That’s so Apple, isn’t it? This is, after all, the company that made a transparent computer (the iMac), a computer with no keys (the iPad) and a phone with hardly any buttons.

Sometimes, Apple’s radical designs come at the expense of usability. You know, like how the MacBook Air laptop is astonishingly thin — but doesn’t let you insert a DVD or swap batteries.

That, then, is the question on the Mac Pro: Is it so artsy that it’s less useful?

In some ways, the compact, stunning cylinder is a huge improvement on the hulking, 20-inch-tall, 40-pound design of the previous Mac Pro model. The new one is desktoppable and one-hand carryable. And the cylindrical design creates an efficient chimney effect that keeps the circuitry cool but amazingly silent. (There’s only one fan — not eight, as in the old Mac Pro — and you really have to strain to hear it.)

On the other hand, the whole point of the Mac Pro has always been expandability. The old Mac Pro’s cavernous interior could accommodate added hard drives, optical drives, expansion cards and so on.

But in its embrace of the cylinder, Apple has turned its Pro computer inside out. There’s no room for anything new inside. You can’t insert a hard drive, a circuit board or a DVD burner.

You can add all of those components — externally — if they have Thunderbolt connectors. Those are tiny jacks, incredibly fast, wildly versatile; the Mac Pro has six of them. Unfortunately, there aren’t many Thunderbolt gadgets yet. (This directory lists about 150 of them, in all the usual categories — storage, video capture, chassis that can hold specialized cards, multichannel audio boxes and so on.)

So is that it, then? Apple expects you to buy the world’s most breathtaking, compact workstation and then surround it with a tangle of mismatched, cluttery, external peripherals?