I have to admit that it is nice to have so many articles about a new Mac Pro to read from all areas of the Apple blog-o-sphere. It hasn’t been this way in about 4 years. All the benchmark posts should be taken with a grain of salt. Remember that your milage will vary depending on the software you use. 

I still haven’t ordered mine yet. I am having a hard time with the CTO $5800 price tag. I have to admit that it would be a lot easier if I knew that Adobe would be optimizing their Creative Suite for these machines. Knowing that the power that $5800 buys me might sit there mostly unused by After Effects and Premiere is really a sticking point for me. I don’t believe that Adobe has said anything about support for OpenCL in After Effects since Apple released the specs back of the new MP in June. Adobe’s track record of incorporating tech adopted by Apple is notoriously poor.

No Spotlight integration in any of their programs.
No Quicklook.
No Core Audio or Core Video incorporation.
Their open/save dialogue boxes are often proprietary and don’t adhere to standard Apple shortcut commands.
I know there is more that is missing.

Can we really count on After Effects and Premiere and Photoshop utilizing the Dual ATI cards in these machines? There is minimal GPU support in these programs NOW. I also have 8 physical cores sitting in my current Mac Pro that only gets used by Ae during a render and sometimes that doesn’t even work correctly.

I think that right now Aperture, Resolve, FCPX and Motion are the only pieces of software that are written to take full advantage of the new Mac Pro (correct me if I’m wrong). I’m sure Cinema 4d and the other 3d programs will get on board fairly quickly because the competition to be faster is important in the 3d marketspace. Not sure about Smoke at this point either. Their software scaled nicely on all platforms already. Adobe needs to be pressured to get on board. FCPX will be getting a good hard look from me in 2014. Whether I’m running it on a new Mac Pro or a new iMac it would be nice to know that the power I pay for will be put to use. For an editor the only option is FCPX right now.

What say you Adobe? Are you planning to support dual ATI GPUs in the Creative Cloud apps in the near future? Your history of ignoring hardware and software advancements doesn’t provide me with hope.

One more thing. Everyone should look over their right shoulder and wave … that is Avid all the way back there being left in the dust.

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas everyone.

Lou Borella

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