My Overdue Eulogy for the Mac Pro

The Mac Pro is now officially dead—but it's been dead to me for years.

I ordered my first quad-core Mac Pro in early 2008, and later got an 8-core 2013 Mac Pro.¹ These two Macs helped me bootstrap the OpenCL spectrogram kernel that put Capo on the map.

During the "dark period", while we all waited for the follow-up to the trashcan Mac², I decided to go hard when I configured my iMac Pro: 18 cores, 64GB RAM, and a Vega 64 GPU. With this Mac (and the help of two eGPUs) I developed and trained the neural network that powers Capo's world-class chord detection engine.

I was nervous about splashing out on the iMac Pro, because we were promised that something big was coming soon. But the polished-stainless-steel Mac that Apple introduced in 2019 was…clearly not for me. Instead, it was aimed squarely at movie and music production environments: with multi-GPU upgrade options for 3D work, video codec accelerators, PCIe slots for wacky audio gear. They even offered a rackmount option to complete a tidy installation in the million-dollar studios they were meant for.³

I think Apple would have been wise to call that product the "Mac Studio", but I digress…

For me, the death of the Mac Pro as a viable development system started around 2013. It wasn't about upgrades or GPUs. It was simpler than that: I felt like one of very few suckers who bought my specific configuration, and nobody at Apple actually used a similar machine. For example, my 2013 Mac Pro had AMD FirePro D700 GPUs (a rare configuration) that often had issues with graphics corruption. Later, my iMac Pro—with its 18 cores—gave me all sorts of trouble in Xcode, often compiling Capo more slowly than my 2013 Mac Pro could.⁴ Adding insult to injury, these machines were not cheap! I tried to "throw money at the problem (of making big computations go faster)", but I actually just bought headaches.

My own software pushed these machines to their limits. Final Cut Pro and Logic ran great too. But Xcode—the thing I use most every day—was a mess.

Anyway, from 2008–2022 I was living the two-Mac lifestyle: a powerful desktop for the heavy development, and a MacBook Pro for work outside the office. And you know what? Those machines didn't just work, they worked great: excellent displays, and they were getting pretty fast—especially after they moved to SSD storage.⁵

But do you know what still sucked about these portable Macs? The desktop experience. You plugged it into a power adapter, and then a second cable for the screen. And that was a crapshoot: weird delays, maybe the wrong resolution (with third-party displays), the keyboard didn't wake the Mac, and sometimes you just had to unplug and try again. It was so frustrating! So I still clung to my dreams of a "Professional Desktop Mac", hoping for a better solution.

Finally, in March 2022 I got my 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Max and 64GB RAM. This machine absolutely ripped apart my iMac Pro—it even trained Capo's custom neural network faster than my Radeon 7 eGPU! But it wasn't until later that summer, when I got a Studio Display, that I got to experience my new favorite "Professional Desktop Mac".

In the morning, my MacBook Pro went into my backpack, I dropped my kids off at school, and went to my office at the University.⁶ I did my schoolwork, attended classes, and worked on my thesis. In the afternoon, I returned to my home office and—after attaching a single cable to my Mac—I was right back where I left off. There were no delays, no fiddling. Everything Just Worked™.

Four years later, and it's still my daily driver. Sometimes when I'm "done for the day", I'll unplug the Mac from the Studio Display and bring it up to the living room. I might check in with support after dinner, or tackle short development tasks from my couch. Some days I'll start work from that spot, because it gets cold in my basement office. When I need more screen space, I head down to the office, and boom: one plug, right back where I left off.

This is something that the Mac Pro could never do: pause the work at my desk in whatever state I left it, resume it from a completely different location—in a library, a coffee shop, or waiting for my car to be serviced—and then cap off the work back at home. And the best part is that this all happens with almost no compromise in performance, and no "range anxiety" that has me carrying a charger.

For me, this "Professional Desktop Mac" experience is nearly perfect⁷, and I haven't looked back at those days of heavy, expensive, power-hungry, heat-generating desk ornaments with anything but disdain. Good riddance, I say!