Apple announces new 8 core Mac Pro.

The fastest Mac's ever.

Potentially good news for those of us in high end jobs but who is really going to benefit from these machines?
When you consider that if you up-spec one of the new Mac Pro's to it's highest potential, then you can reach dizzying prices of over $20,000 for a system.

The Mac Pro is Apple's flagship computer, despite the iMac being the best known and perhaps best designed machine, earning the most attention and praise from the press, the Mac Pro is a behemoth. The sheer computing power inside the aluminium box is something that many pro users will already be salivating over and rightly so, however, in my experience, high end Mac towers generally aren't used by freelance designers anymore.

The last widely used pro Mac that was prevalent in the design industry was the G4 tower. I'm sure some of you reading will be using G5 or Mac Pro's and about to jump in and let me know that they're still used widely, but the fact is the Mac Pro is simply too powerful nowadays for the average designer.
Sure, there will always be people with the available cash who want the high end system and two of Apple's 30" Cinema Displays, but they are increasingly in the minority.

The Mac Pro has leapfrogged a large chunk of users who perhaps would have once bought one, no longer is the graphic designer the target market for Apple's pro systems, now it falls to music producers and video editors to pick up the slack. Of course you can pick up a low end Mac Pro for a few thousand dollars, but most of the members of this site simply wouldn't use the raw power of the machine. For the money a fully loaded iMac would probably be a better buy.

Of course this doesn't necessarily apply to companies dealing in design, they generally will still continue to use high end systems and separate displays for reasons of scalability, but even there in the corporate world iMacs are appearing on the majority of desks with Mac Pro's making up a small proportion of users.

So what does this mean for you?
Should you not buy an eight core Mac Pro if you were considering one? That really depends on what you're going to use it for, do you really need eight cores of processing power, will you really benefit from it enough to justify the cost? Will you ever fill the RAM slots with the THIRTY TWO gigabytes that it can take? Probably not, unless of course you plan to keep the system for more than five years or will be editing masses of HD video.

The Mac Pro will continue to be the flagship machine in the Apple stable, however it will also increasingly lose it's old users and move in to new territories. High-end science applications, broadcast HD video, pro music production are all areas that will see a massive expansion of Mac users.
The Mac Pro will blaze the trail for high end professional business machines and by doing so will accelerate the pace of the technologies filtering in to the iMac and MacBook lines benefiting everyone, but until the software catches up with the hardware, with a big push in to 64 bit computing and true efficient multi-core applications, a system so powerful is becoming increasingly irrelevant to most of us.

Is there anyone out there who would really use and benefit from the power in an eight core 3.2 GHz, 32GB system?