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I bought a Mac Pro in 2013 (the entry level model) and have been using it reliably for about 3 years. With two 27 inch lcds, and a thunderbolt external drive,

I bought a Mac Pro in 2013 (the entry level model) and have been using it reliably for about 3 years. With two 27 inch lcds, and a thunderbolt external drive, it's been solid development machine. I can also boot an external windows drive to play PC games, with ok performance on the last gen of games. The form factor is great for traveling (I can stuff it in a suitcase and take it anywhere). Last few weeks it's been kernel panicking a couple times a day (when under heavy stress). And it'd be nice to have upgraded GPU to play the latest batch of PC games (and VR). I'm pretty disappointed Apple has made zero updates to this model in over 1000 days. Given how much use I'd gotten out of this machine, it's hard to say it's been a mistake purchasing it. But there's also not really much I can do to upgrade it since external GPUs don't really work with Thunderbolt 2. My guess is the Mac Pro line gets quietly discontinued by next year. 15 yrs ago I bought a G4 Cube, some lessons I never learn.

inatreecrown 10y ago
> I can also boot an external windows drive I didn't know this was possible. Does this work only on the Mac Pro?
- AlexeyBrin 10y ago
  Works on all Macs (tried on MacBook Air and Pro), the problem is convincing Windows to install on the external drive. If you have a Windows Pro license you could use Windows to Go and install it on an external drive.
  - johncolanduoni 10y ago
    It's not too hard with Windows 10 to do the Windows To Go process manually in UEFI mode. I've had pretty good luck with online guides.
shadowfacts 10y ago
> Last few weeks it's been kernel panicking a couple times a day (when under heavy stress). This used to happen to me as well(late August/early September). When it was under medium/heavy load it would freeze up occasionally and eventually kernel panic. I completely wiped the drive and reinstalled macOS which completely resolved the problem. I just chalked it up to a weird system file being corrupted.
danudey 10y ago
The existence of USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 means that the Mac Pro, as it is right now, might not be very necessary. Processors and RAM are important, of course, if you're doing intensive work, but things like GPUs could be attached separately via Thunderbolt 3. I could see AMD creating a pro-level FirePro external TB3 "card", a box like an external hard drive that you just plug in via TB3 and off you go. Apparently only one of the FirePro GPUs on the Mac Pro is hooked up in such a way as to contribute towards graphics performance, with the other being solely for compute; an external box designed specifically to hold a FirePro chip and associated hardware (VRAM, VMU, etc) could be styled, cooled, and shaped differently, and could provide a simple add-on for people who want parallel computation. In other words, we could use TB3 to add on FirePro computation the way we use USB to add on hard drives. With that kind of philosophy, the Mac Pro could be cheaper and easier to build, more expandable and not less, and appeal to more people. If I could order what was effectively a Mac Mini but with 32 GB of RAM and a Xeon or high-end desktop i7, I would buy ten of them tomorrow, and for people who want to do things like hardware-accelerated computation or transcoding they could buy add-ons that would do that work for them.

inatreecrown 10y ago

> I can also boot an external windows drive I didn't know this was possible. Does this work only on the Mac Pro?

AlexeyBrin 10y ago
Works on all Macs (tried on MacBook Air and Pro), the problem is convincing Windows to install on the external drive. If you have a Windows Pro license you could use Windows to Go and install it on an external drive.
- johncolanduoni 10y ago
  It's not too hard with Windows 10 to do the Windows To Go process manually in UEFI mode. I've had pretty good luck with online guides.

shadowfacts 10y ago

> Last few weeks it's been kernel panicking a couple times a day (when under heavy stress). This used to happen to me as well(late August/early September). When it was under medium/heavy load it would freeze up occasionally and eventually kernel panic. I completely wiped the drive and reinstalled macOS which completely resolved the problem. I just chalked it up to a weird system file being corrupted.

danudey 10y ago

The existence of USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 means that the Mac Pro, as it is right now, might not be very necessary. Processors and RAM are important, of course, if you're doing intensive work, but things like GPUs could be attached separately via Thunderbolt 3. I could see AMD creating a pro-level FirePro external TB3 "card", a box like an external hard drive that you just plug in via TB3 and off you go. Apparently only one of the FirePro GPUs on the Mac Pro is hooked up in such a way as to contribute towards graphics performance, with the other being solely for compute; an external box designed specifically to hold a FirePro chip and associated hardware (VRAM, VMU, etc) could be styled, cooled, and shaped differently, and could provide a simple add-on for people who want parallel computation. In other words, we could use TB3 to add on FirePro computation the way we use USB to add on hard drives. With that kind of philosophy, the Mac Pro could be cheaper and easier to build, more expandable and not less, and appeal to more people. If I could order what was effectively a Mac Mini but with 32 GB of RAM and a Xeon or high-end desktop i7, I would buy ten of them tomorrow, and for people who want to do things like hardware-accelerated computation or transcoding they could buy add-ons that would do that work for them.