Apple’s New Mac Pro

mac book 5The Mac Pro’s ace in the hole is two top-of-the-line graphics cards. In the olden days, these circuit boards were dedicated to the task of displaying images on your screens. Now, though, they’re screamingly fast computers in their own right — and the Mac Pro is designed to assign them some of the work the main processing chip would normally do. Many hands make light work, you know.

So it must come as a shock to learn that the Mac Pro isn’t especially fast at many everyday tasks. Macworld’s benchmark testing found that the new Mac Pro is actually slower than an ordinary iMac in iMovie, iTunes, Aperture, Parallels and the desktop.

Yet in tests of high-end, data-crunchy apps like Final Cut Pro X, Photoshop, iPhoto, HandBrake and Mathematica, the Mac Pro was faster than any Mac ever tested. These, of course, are precisely the kinds of programs that professionals use. For them, time is money, and the Mac Pro can save both.

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