On the other hand, the whole point of the Mac Pro has always been expandability. The old Mac Pro’s cavernous interior could accommodate added hard drives, optical drives, expansion cards and so on.
But in its embrace of the cylinder, Apple has turned its Pro computer inside out. There’s no room for anything new inside. You can’t insert a hard drive, a circuit board or a DVD burner.
You can add all of those components — externally — if they have Thunderbolt connectors. Those are tiny jacks, incredibly fast, wildly versatile; the Mac Pro has six of them. Unfortunately, there aren’t many Thunderbolt gadgets yet. (This directory lists about 150 of them, in all the usual categories — storage, video capture, chassis that can hold specialized cards, multichannel audio boxes and so on.)
So is that it, then? Apple expects you to buy the world’s most breathtaking, compact workstation and then surround it with a tangle of mismatched, cluttery, external peripherals?
Apple says that misses the point. The world is changing, it says. The “everything crammed into one computer” model is going away. Nowadays, professional creative companies install centralized storage — shared network hard drives tucked away in a server closet somewhere. That arrangement gets the bulk, heat and noise away from you, the creative genius.