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Apple's WWDC developer's conference keynote finally delivered what the designers, photographers, video editors, and other pro-grade creatives who grew up on Apple have been waiting for -- multiple references to the band Rush. Unfortunately this was overshadowed slightly by the insanely powerful new Mac Pro, which will likely be better remembered.
Pity the unfaithful who gave up on the neglected Mac Pro and bought the [recently upgraded iMac](https://www.wired.com/story/apple-imac-desktop-refresh/) because Apple has brought back the cheese grater and finally created Mac Pro worthy of the name.
Apple's keynote usually shun specs, but the company pulled out all the stops for the new Mac Pro, touting the details of graphics cards and brightness nits in the monitor. These are exactly the kind of details high end users care about and Apple has clearly been listening to them. It was refreshing to see Apple getting excited about a high end machine few of us will ever be able to afford.
Keynote theatrics aside, the new Mac Pro is a truly professional grade machine and it does have a truly professional grade price tag to match. They may be worth every penny -- we'll know for sure when they arrive this Fall -- but it's a lot of pennies. The new Mac Pro starts at $5,999 for the 8-core model with 32GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. That can be configured up to a 28 core model with 1.5TB of RAM. A new Pro Display XDR monitor to go along with your workstation will set you back another $4,999 for the base model, bring the cost of a full setup to $11,000. And that's just the base model.
The new Mac Pro is all about processing power and graphics. There's an up to 28 core Xeon processor, up to 1.5 terabytes of RAM and an option for as many as 4 Radeon Pro Vega II graphics cards which will net you enough power to playback three simultaneous streams of 8K video, a feat Apple showed off during the WWDC keynote.
What's perhaps most welcome is that Apple has bucked the trend it help start and provided a case that's easy to open up. Yes, it's a user upgradable Mac with up to eight PCI Express expansion slots. That's twice as many slots as the last Mac Pro.
Apple is also touting a new hardware acceleration card it calls Afterburner. It's the magic behind the Mac Pro's ability to handle three simultaneous streams of 8K ProRes RAW footage, which is what you get from [RED](https://www.wired.com/2017/05/red-modular-camera-system/) and similar high end cameras. With the graphics card handling the video playback you can use all those primary processing cores to handle creative effects and other processing tasks.
Even the most powerful video editing workstation is nothing without a display to match and for that Apple has delivered something that might be more impressive than the Mac Pro.
The Pro Display XDR is 32-inch Retina 6K display. It boasts up to 1600 nits of brightness, sustaining 100 nits and features a contrast ration of one million to one, which puts it, in case you aren't an expert in monitors, in class of what's call reference displays. Reference displays are insanely expensive tools (think mid 5-digits), used primarily in high end production shops to whom the Pro Display XDR's $4,999 price tag probably sounds like a fire sale.
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