There was a time when nobody could go wrong buying a Mac Pro tower. The possibilities for expansion (and modification) were excellent, leaving its users satisfied. But Apple updated the Mac Pro in December 2013... and it hasn't received a single upgrade since then. Despite its apparent specifications, the truth is that the current Mac Pro offering doesn't make sense, and to prove it, the Tech Guy channel pits it against a Ryzen-based PC that costs 73% less.
Why the Mac Pro Is Stuck
Last week, Apple made a sort of mea culpa to some specialized media and admitted that the last generation of the Mac Pro was a mistake. Pro hardware users are few but extremely vocal, and in recent months Cupertino has treated them rather poorly. One question we should ask is why the Mac Pro hasn't had a specification revision in more than three years. There are two reasons, though Apple acknowledged only one.
The "new" Mac Pro design basically put the company in a thermal trap it can't escape, so responding to users' demands on CPU and GPU is impossible with this format. The second reason is commercial: 80% of all Macs Apple sells are MacBooks, while desktop systems (iMac and Mac Pro) split the remaining 20%. Apple confirmed that the Mac Pro will get a major redesign with a modular structure, but it will reach shelves in 2018. Users who can't wait and need power now have only one option: to move to a custom Windows 10 PC.
The Benchmark: Mac Pro vs. Ryzen
If anyone out there still isn't convinced, just watch the latest benchmark published by Tech Guy on YouTube. The guinea pig was Photoshop, which was used to pit a $5,660 Mac Pro against a Ryzen 7 1700 platform costing $1,530. Beyond differences in instructions per cycle, both chips have similar conditions: 3.0 GHz, 8 physical cores, and 16 processing threads. As if that weren't enough, the Ryzen system has only 16 GB of RAM, versus 64 GB on the Mac Pro. The processor dependence in Photoshop is very high, to the point that GPU acceleration has no effect: applying a Radial Blur effect on the Mac Pro takes 15 seconds.
How long does the Ryzen PC take? 8.8 seconds. As a bonus, Tech Guy gave a mild 500 MHz overclock to the Ryzen processor, and the result dropped to 7.7 seconds. In summary, it's almost double the performance for 27% of the cost of a Mac Pro. Granted, the Xeon E5-1680 V2 is a chip that will turn four years old in September and uses the Ivy Bridge-EP architecture. But these results highlight the need for a major upgrade for the Mac Pro, and the timelines Apple sets aren't very good.
