A Standing O for Apple's New Mac Pro

A Standing O for Apple's New Mac Pro

Ever wonder why there has been a massive slowdown in PC growth? Don't blame Windows 8, blame Apple!

Apple has been the leader in tech and there is no indication that anything has changed. Dell is no leader, nor is Microsoft, Lenovo, or IBM. It's Apple. And Apple went too long without showing something new, thus the desktop market slowed down.

So it finally rolls out what appears to be a spectacular desktop machine capable of delivering a whopping seven teraflops of processing power. This is obviously the future king of all multimedia work, especially video editing, which needs all the help it can get. I would also assume that sort of power would make any Adobe application pop. No waiting!

The machine maxes out with 12 cores of Xeon E5 power and a souped-up RAM subsystem that will peak at 60 gigabytes per second bandwidth. It's a total butt-kicker that has no peer today.

Tomorrow is another story because within 30 days, the PC competition will roll out all sorts of machines that will attempt to match the Mac and undercut the price. Then again, maybe the competition won't do anything.

And even if they do something, it will pale in comparison to the Mac Pro's radical design. It's a 6.6-by-9.9-inch tube. It's not a box and it's not the old Apple cheese grater. Its unique design will surely win a lot of awards.

More importantly, you now have to wonder how the competition will counter this. Will someone else make a tubular computer? I doubt it since the competition can barely manage a cube, let alone a tube like this.

Apple left the PC designers in the dust with the old cheese grater and then blew up the market for laptops with the MacBooks and their unique solid aluminum cases. Now this. All the while, the PC desktoppers were still making big funky boxes filled with mostly air (and still overheating). Even the iMac was hard to copy. A few makers tried but got zero traction.

Apple's New Mac Pro: What You Need to Know

In this column, I've chided the PC makers for being duds for years. Most recently, I said that these folks should be promoting high-performance and three-monitor setups.

Of course nothing came of the idea. Now Apple rolls this gem out bragging about teraflops and multiple monitorsâ€"and not just three monitors but three 4K monitors!

The brain-dead PC folks are flat-footed once more. I can hear the counter argument already: "Well, this is all well and good but at the end of the day, people will be buying our cheap junk anyway because, well, it's cheap."

The PC makers should be ever so proud.