Mac Pro Desktop Is Worth the High Price: 10 Reasons Why

By Don Reisinger

It’s hard not to look at the Mac Pro and remark at its beauty. The device comes with a piano black finish, and it’s cylindrical in shape. Better yet, it’s just 9.9 inches tall, making it one of the smallest powerful desktops on the market. Design matters to customers. And on that front, Apple’s desktop wins out.

When it comes to the Mac Pro’s processor, it delivers enough power for companies to ensure they stay relevant for years to come. The base model comes with a 3.7GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor, but customers can go all the way up to a 2.7GHz 12-core option with 30MB of L3 cache. In other words, this thing is a beast.

When customers order the Mac Pro online, they can make accessory purchases beyond component modifications. On the accessories side, Apple lists a 4K display made by Sharp that features a 3,840-by-2,160-pixel resolution. It turns out the Mac Pro has enough graphical firepower to deliver 4K resolution. And on the 31.5-inch display, that means the possibility—depending on content—of pushing out over 8 million pixels to the display.

The Mac Pro was built with expansion in mind. That’s why Apple bundled four USB 3 ports, as well as six Thunderbolt 2 ports. The device also includes support for Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI 1.4. With those ports available, just about anything that matters to the average Mac Pro buyer can be connected to the device.

At first glance, the Mac Pro’s starting price of $2,999 might seem like a lot. But when one considers that Apple is bundling all that power, all that expansion, all that graphics power and high-end features into such a small box, it starts to make sense. The Mac Pro is the most advanced computer Apple has ever released. And that seems to justify its high price tag.

The Mac Pro, like many of Apple’s earlier products, is designed for the graphic designer at heart. In addition to a wildly powerful processor, the device includes support for dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs featuring 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM. That allows graphic designers to connect up to three 4K displays or six Apple Thunderbolt screens. Plus, it’ll be a beast when folks are trying to edit video.

Apple has been criticized in the past for leaving some features out of its products, like the iPhone or iPad, only to make them available the next year and get customers to buy updates each year. The Mac Pro isn’t falling into that trap. The device has all of the advanced features desktop buyers can get right now, meaning it can thrive on desks for years to come without any worry of sluggishness.

Looking around the desktop market, it’s hard to find many alternatives to the Mac Pro that really matter. Companies like Dell, HP and others have been pumping out desktops each year, but they’re not innovative. They lack creativity, and they’re downright ugly. Apple has little to worry about in the desktop space, save for the few boutique PC makers that actually care about design and power. But even those makers, such as Velocity Micro, can’t match Apple in terms of market appeal.

Apple made the interesting move to bundle wireless into the Mac Pro in addition to Gigabit Ethernet. The computer will ship with the latest wireless standard, 802.11ac. Right now, few products support the wireless-AC standard, and routers that work with it are few and far between. But most analysts expect that to change in 2014. That’s good news for Mac Pro owners.

Apple has made a surprisingly forceful announcement with the Mac Pro: Desktops should actually be able to sit atop desks. The Mac Pro is just 9.9 inches tall and has a diameter of 6.6 inches. And thanks to its attractive design, it won’t look out of place on a desk. Look for more companies to deliver Mac Pro-like desktops in the new year.