14 DAY TRIAL // Many are up in their arms over Jony Ive’s new Mac Pro design. The consensus among naysayers is that it looks like a trash bin. And, compared to the right trash bin, it does.
The Mac Pro’s breakthrough design is getting tarnished in the media after Amazon Japan started seeing a lot of orders for a garbage can that looks an awful lot like the powerful workstation which Apple is set to debut this fall.
While admittedly nonconformist, the new Mac Pro’s design can be likened to any number of things, from batteries to stools.
But you can say the same thing about a lot of other products out there. At least the Mac Pro has something to show for it. Like that “cool” thermal core it's got inside.
“Rather than using multiple heat sinks and fans to cool the processor and graphics cards, we built everything around a single piece of extruded aluminum designed to maximize airflow as well as thermal capacity,” says Apple.
“It works by conducting heat away from the CPU and GPUs and distributing that heat uniformly across the core. That way, if one processor isn’t working as hard as the others, the extra thermal capacity can be shared efficiently among them,” the company explains.
You can’t achieve that with a traditional design. Plus, the Mac Pro is built for processing needs, not to make offices look pretty. And this product quite possibly achieves both. Even Apple says, “No computer has been built this way before.”
The thermal core goes hand in hand with the single fan that pulls air upward through a bottom vent. This also blends perfectly with the cylindrical design.
“As air passes vertically through the center of the device, it absorbs heat and carries it out the top. It’s simple and elegant — and also astonishingly quiet,” according to the Mac Pro’s marketing page.
Apple doesn’t cut corners when it sets out to create something new (obviously they did in this case, but only literally), and when they do innovate amid immense pressure from the public, this is what they get.
It'll be interesting to see how other workstations fare against the new Mac Pro when the benchmarks roll out.