Apple’s new Mac Pro—handles, holes and all—is a perfect reboot of the classic Mac we thought was long gone.
So the jokes about Apple re-releasing the cheese grater Mac turned out to be true. During its WWDC19 keynote, Apple unveiled the new modular Mac Pro that it’s been teasing for the better part of two years. It looks an awful lot like the Power Mac G5 design (that was eventually carried over to the Intel-based Mac Pro) that was retired back in 2013.
Quite frankly, Apple could have saved us all a lot of agita if it had just released this design back in 2006. It’s a natural evolution of the Power Mac G5, and I can’t help but think it’s one of the thousand nos from the original Mac Pro’s design process. Call it a reboot.
Of course, the inside of the new Mac Pro makes the Power Mac G5 look like a toy, with “workstation-class Xeon processors up to 28 cores, a high-performance memory system with a massive 1.5TB capacity, eight PCIe expansion slots and a graphics architecture featuring the world’s most powerful graphics card.” Unlike the Power Macs of old or even the cylindrical Mac Pro the new model replaces, the new Mac Pro is clearly aimed at the most discriminating of Apple users, for whom even a $15,000 iMac Pro isn’t powerful enough.
The Power Mac G5 was one of Apple’s more polarizing designs, especially since it followed the beloved Mirrored Drive Doors Power Mac G4.
