My Mac Pro: 10 Reasons It Was a Smart Purchase Decision

by Don Reisinger

The first thing that hits you when you open the Mac Pro box is just how gorgeous the desktop’s design is. The Mac Pro is short and stocky and might look a little like a garbage can, but its piano black finish makes it an attractive desk accessory. I can’t help but look over and admire just how far Apple’s desktop product design has come.

Desktop computers are big, bulky and ugly, and they’re not designed for space savings. The new Mac Pro, however, is actually designed to sit atop a desk and looks quite nice on it. My Mac Pro is sitting on my desk, and it actually looks like it belongs. It’s a little heavy, but it’s nice to know that I own a desktop that actually lives up to its name.

Although the Mac Pro is designed to be the fastest computer Apple offers, it’s still quite shocking to see how quickly it handles tasks. I attempted to run video processing while editing photos and both downloading and uploading files, and the Mac Pro handled those tasks without any slowdown whatsoever. Everything with the Mac Pro is just faster. And I couldn’t be happier about that.

Listen up, enterprise: If you’re looking for a product that will improve employee productivity, the Mac Pro might just do the trick. As mentioned, the computer is fast, and since it has so many ports—six Thunderbolt, four USB and an HDMI—it allows for support for tons of displays and accessories. My productivity was maximized with the Mac Pro.

I love the flexibility that the six Thunderbolt ports give me. Sure, I can set up several displays, but I can also daisy-chain devices and set up all kinds of ultrafast storage solutions. I’ve found Thunderbolt to be both fast and agile and should only become more appealing as time goes on and more devices support it.

I’m future-proofed with the Mac Pro. My old Mac Pro lasted several years before it started to slow down, and I own other Macs that have been with me even longer that didn’t take the same, day-in, day-out abuse my old Mac Pro did. Considering this computer has better components and I learned some lessons along the way with my last Mac Pro on how to treat Apple’s hardware and software, I’m convinced this computer will last me a very long time.

As mentioned, I’m looking forward to more Thunderbolt-ready devices to ship over time. With the Mac Pro, you can daisy-chain up to 36 devices and experience no slowdown in their functionality. What that means is that as my computing needs grow, I know that I’ll have everything I need in my Mac Pro to get the job done. Long gone are the days of buying third-party USB or FireWire accessories to accommodate all the devices I want hooked up to my computer.

While the old Mac Pro wasn’t necessarily loud, it wasn’t quiet, either. The new Mac Pro is shockingly quiet. In fact, as I sit here writing this on the new device, I hear no sound emitted by the computer. Even when I pushed the computer to its limits, the Mac Pro was surprisingly quiet. Apple did a fantastic job dampening the sound in the Mac Pro.

No commentary on the Mac Pro would be complete without talking about the way it handles OS X Mavericks. And in my experience so far, it does so without any issue. I’ve found that Mavericks is a bit more responsive on the Mac Pro than in the Retina MacBook Pro and generally handles tasks a bit more quickly. OS X is an all-around solid operating system that makes using the Mac Pro all the better.

While the Mac Pro is expensive, starting at $3,000, the device actually justifies its price tag. The computer is absolutely gorgeous, has the specs to last a long time and comes with enough components to make it a standout in the desktop market. Amortized over the many years I’ll own the Mac Pro, it might actually turn out to be a smart investment.