Well, after watching the tear-down video, I realize this isn't a photo of the "evil R2D2!

Some early benchmarks.. with a modified 2010 MP.

http://www.barefeats.com/tube04.html

CPU upgradeable.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/12/new-mac-pro-teardown-reveals-replaceable-xeon-cpu/?comments=1

The new Mac Pro is over six-and-a-half times faster than the latest MacBook Air. Not shabby.
Read more at http://www.cultofmac.com/262016/12-core-mac-pro-scores-33000-geekbench/#qSwkCu476yROPVD3.99

Not to dis the Air, but it ain't exactly the powerhouse of the lineup. Apparently, the more relevant comparison would be the "old" Mac Pro (or the current iMac, depending on what apps you use). In my case, according to their graph, the new 12-core doubles the performance of my 2010 8-core. Not bad by any means, but not nearly 6X …

And I don't know if you've seen the price of a new 12-core MacPro, but …

;-)

Are you buying it?

Pfffffffft. Speed? Ya want SPEED? I gotcher speed right here…



Pay very close attention to that model name, Hotshot.

When has a new model ever been 6X more powerful than the previous?
They just said that for effect.

$3,000 is expensive. But this is not a huge leap over the prices of previous models... especially when you consider the 2 workstation vidcards.

That being said.. I can not afford one. Yet.

It's not a huge leap in price over the previous model... and it's not a huge leap in power/speed over the Core i7 iMac in real-world everyday tasks.

You can make the argument that the MacPro is not for doing everyday tasks for average people (and you'd be right), but it's still hard to justify the cost.

I have the i7 27" iMac w/4GB video card at home, and we have one of the new MacPros at work. I see little to no speed improvement in any apps at all (though I did NOT try any video editing apps at all).

I got the 27" iMac with 32GB RAM, 500GB Flash Drive, 4GB Video Card upgrade, keyboard, mouse & magic pad for about the same money as the base model MacPro with no upgrades. That's a 27" monitor, KB, mouse, magic pad, more RAM, more storage and an iSight camera for essentially the same computing power (for what I do, anyway).

Yeah, I hear ya. My issue is that my iMac doesn't keep up vidcard-wise. AND I would like to run a separate monitor off of it for palettes and such... but that would really kill the card.

Dunno...I'm sort of on the fence at this point.

Prolly wait till I see a refurb for 2700.00