The Mac Pro cuts an impressive silhouette, and the lucky folks who saw it up close at WWDC today were left gobsmacked.
But it also made several people giggle. They could only stare at the machine’s ventilation holes and top handles and see an expensive cheese grater.
Pictures of cheese graters soon populated Twitter under the hashtag #WWDC19. One Twitter user, Noemi Kalman, joked that Apple gave new meaning to “Mac and Cheese.”
I was lucky enough to get an early edition… with lightning cable #WWDC19 pic.twitter.com/lvzUXa70bg
— Alex Ellis (@alexellisuk) June 3, 2019
Goodbye Trash Can!
Hello Cheese Grater!#WWDC19 pic.twitter.com/SGA0yf7uSK
— Jared Naude (@JaredNaude) June 3, 2019
Cheese grater jokes aside, new Mac Pro promises serious power
Apple’s brushed aluminum skin is thick enough to handle the snark that tends to follow the unveiling of a new product. When Apple first showed off the HomePod smart speaker, some on Twitter saw a design inspired by a roll of toilet paper. Apple Watch, AirPods and the Apple Pencil also took early social media shellackings — only to earn critical praise later.
Inside that cheese-grater housing are an Intel Xeon 28-core processor plus room to upgrade system memory and PCI expansion. For hardware experts, app developers and other creative pros – at least those who will be able to cough up the $6,000 and extra cash for pricey upgrades – the new Mac Pro is a long overdue dream machine.
“I remember when everyone said Apple was abandoning their audience,” analyst Ben Bajarin wrote on Twitter. “Today, they have shown the most pro machine in their history.”
First impressions of new Mac Pro
Shortly after the new Mac Pro, due out this fall, hit the stage, Apple released a laundry list of developers and their impressions from test-driving prototypes.
“The new Mac Pro is insanely fast — it’s by far the fastest image editor we’ve ever experienced or seen,” said Simonas Bastys, lead developer of imaging software company Pixelmator. “When editing RAW shots, users can choose to view extended dynamic detail in images, invisible on other displays, for a phenomenal viewing experience like we never imagined.”
From Pixar: “This new machine clearly shows Apple is delivering on the needs of professionals at high-end production facilities like Pixar,” Guido Quaroni, Pixar’s vice president of Software Research and Development, said in the Apple statement.
Tech Crunch’s Devin Coldewey noted the reaction to some in the audience at WWDC.
“The crowd lost it when one demo showed a thousand audio tracks being played at once, using 56 threads and not even stressing the CPU,” Coldewey wrote.
From Jonathan Terrasi, a reporter for Digital Trends: “With a WWDC 2019 focused on software, consumers were quite pleasantly surprised, and nearly overwhelmed, to see the reappearance of the formidable new desktop product announced alongside their array of improved software offerings.
“The cheese grater design aside, the new Mac Pro is exactly what many professionals have been calling for many years.”
The Verge’s Dieter Bohn and Nick State witnessed the demo Apple had arranged for WWDC attendees.
“As for what Apple expects users to do with this much power, the available demos highlight the usual suspects: film, music, and photo production and editing as well as 3D graphics,” the two wrote. “Demo is a bit of a misleading word in this case, as we weren’t actually allowed to touch the machines or run any kind of real-world tests. But we were able to see the new Mac Pro running software like Logic, Lightroom, and Final Cut Pro X. By all accounts, it seems like even the base version of the Mac Pro is among the most powerful creative production and editing machines Apple has ever concocted.”
