The Mac Pro: A Valuable Option? Or Not?

When it comes to buying a new computer, especially one with high-end graphics capabilities, there are limited options available on the market. One such option is the Mac Pro, which can be quite pricey due to its proprietary nature and custom boards made specifically for this machine. While some may find it worth the investment, others may question its value.

One of the main concerns with the Mac Pro is its graphics capabilities. The graphics card used in this particular model is a Radeon Pro 570X, which is considered low-end compared to other options available on the market. For example, an RX 5000 or RX 580 would likely outperform this machine, as well as a late 2013 iMac with GTX 780M graphics.

However, some may argue that the Mac Pro has its advantages. One of these is its upgradability. While it can be difficult to access certain parts of the computer, upgrading the RAM and SSD are relatively straightforward processes. This makes it an attractive option for those who want a machine they can customize and upgrade over time.

Another advantage of the Mac Pro is its processor. While the quad-core processor used in this particular model may not be the most powerful, it can still provide decent performance for general use cases. However, for more demanding tasks such as video editing or 3D modeling, a more powerful processor would be required. Fortunately, this machine can be easily upgraded to include a 12-core processor, which would greatly improve its performance.

Despite these advantages, the Mac Pro may not be the best value option on the market. With a price tag of $1,200, it's hard to compete with other machines that offer similar or better performance at a lower cost. The Mac Mini, for example, is a more affordable option that can provide decent performance for general use cases.

However, there is one possible advantage to the Mac Pro: its uniqueness. With no direct competitors on the market, Apple has a monopoly on high-end desktop computers with dedicated graphics capabilities. This means that if you want a machine like this, you're likely to have it. Additionally, the Mac Pro's proprietary nature may make it more attractive to certain users who value exclusivity and are willing to pay a premium for it.

The question remains, though: is the Mac Pro worth the investment? While it has its advantages, its high price tag and limited competition on the market make it difficult to justify. In the meantime, Apple may want to consider launching a Mac Mini Pro with similar specifications and features, which could provide a more affordable and attractive option for users.

Virtual Credit Cards and Privacy

In related news, virtual credit cards have become a popular way to protect personal information. These digital accounts allow users to create multiple virtual credit cards, each with its own unique card number and expiration date. This can be particularly useful for online shopping or other activities where sensitive financial information is involved.

Privacy.com has recently launched two new paid plans: Pro and Teams. The Pro plan costs $10 per month and includes features such as 1% cash back on all purchases, up to 36 virtual credit cards per month, and additional security and privacy measures. The Teams plan, on the other hand, costs $25 per month and includes everything included in the Pro plan, plus access to a dedicated Account Manager, 60 virtual credit cards per month, and transaction limits tailored to your business needs.

Users can sign up for these plans without needing a credit card, making it easy to try out virtual credit cards. As always, be sure to follow proper security protocols when using digital accounts to protect your personal information.

Upgrading the Mac Pro

For those who are willing to take on the challenge of upgrading their own computer, there is some good news: the Mac Pro can be upgraded to include a 12-core processor. This may require some disassembly and manual labor, but it's doable with the right tools and expertise.

While upgrading the CPU is possible, other parts of the machine are more difficult to access. For example, getting inside the Mac Mini requires specialized tools and can be a bit of a hassle. However, this can also be an advantage for those who want a machine they can customize and upgrade over time.

The processor used in the Mac Pro is currently quad-core, but it's possible to upgrade to a more powerful 12-core processor. This would greatly improve the machine's performance, making it suitable for demanding tasks such as video editing or 3D modeling.

However, upgrading the CPU requires some expertise and specialized tools. It's not a task for beginners, and those who are new to computer hardware may want to consider seeking guidance from more experienced individuals before attempting the upgrade.

In conclusion, while the Mac Pro has its advantages and disadvantages, it may not be the best value option on the market. However, with its upgradability and customizable nature, it can be an attractive option for those who want a machine they can personalize and upgrade over time.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enover the past year I've talked a lot of smack about the trashcan MacPro and you know honestly I felt bad I want to give it a fair chance so I bought one and we're gonna see if it's still as bad as everyone thinks it is this video is sponsored by privacy with privacy you can buy things online using virtual credit cards instead of real ones protecting your identity and bank information on the Internet as the special treat privacy is offering you guys at free five dollars just for signing up by heading over to privacy calm slash Luke my Ani look at this tiny box sorry anyway a couple of weeks ago I made a video about the stubbornly high prices for the trashcan Mac Pro and I was just so confused and quite frankly a little bit frustrated by how expensive these things are given that they're six years outdated in terms of the hardware and yes I know they sold them up until like two months ago so many people on eBay they're like who will I put mine in 2017 so if you're a watcher of the channel you may remember almost a year ago in I think it was April 2019 I want the cheapest trashcan Mac Pro on eBay to see if it was any good I paid $1,300 I got a 6 core model now weirdly enough that computer still to this day was probably the best deal I would still have picked that over this if it had been available so let's unbox this and I'll tell you what I got because this is the weirdest situation I'm talking about a video that I made almost a year ago and it still was the best deal arguably on a 2013 trashcan Mac Pro how is that even possible how is it possible that this computer didn't depreciate at all over the course of a year that's crazy all right here it comes there we go there it is so what is it well this was 1,200 bucks the cheapest Mac Pro that I could find on eBay and it's not that special whenever I try to make videos about buying the cheapest of something I try to find something unique something special like oh it's the cheapest but it's super upgraded this is pretty much stock except for one upgrade this is the quad core model yeah you heard that right quad core it's got 16 gigabytes of RAM and it's got the d300 based graphics the only thing that's upgraded is it has a 512 gigabyte SSD which actually now that I mention it why don't we check out here that looks like a factory Apple SSD and it looks like we have the factory Ram as well so this has pretty much been upgraded only through Apple nothing has been done after the fact it's honestly not that good not that good on paper so why don't we go and see if there's anything redeeming once we get this thing booted up all right let's fire up the old girl mmm smells like computers oh look at that no no I don't want to use voiceover stop it Lana all of this is getting cut out all right so I've downloaded some benchmarks we're gonna start off the test with Geekbench 4 just to sort of get a baseline of where this thing Falls so this computer has a xeon e5 1620 v 2 it's honestly a pretty low-end quad-core processor and it should perform similarly to a core i7 3770 or a 3770k oh oh dear that's not good 14600 and 6 with under 4000 in the single core so single core pretty weak as you would expect it's older that means we were being significantly outperformed by the base model 13-inch MacBook Pro Yates so Senate bench our 20 should give us a better idea of multi-core performance and as a measure of how well it's doing we'll see how hot it gets twelve hundred bucks for a quad core it's crazy there's a core i7 4850 HQ on there 2.3 gigahertz it's cores 1509 so that would be a late 2013 15-inch MacBook Pro and then 1647 on there is what they have for a core i7 6700 HQ which would be a base model late 2016 MacBook Pro now both of those are mobile processors and this is a Xeon even though it's a little older I'd like to think that at the very least we can beat those hopefully oh no oh no that's not good fourteen seventy six so what that means is that this which is an overpriced three year old laptop beats it handily and this which is a well priced six year old laptop also beats it so that's not good this is half the price and you're getting pretty much the same CPU performance out of this old-ass laptop so what I want to do next is test out the graphics by the way if you want to see how this computer compares to your system for example run Unigine heaven on the extreme preset and we'll get comparable numbers leave those down in the comments below what does your computer get and how much did you pay for it so what we're on the subject of graphics why don't we talk about the weird graphics situation in this trashcan Mac Pro all of these trashcan Mac Pros have dual graphics this one is the base model and it has the d 300 graphics so that's dual d300s they have two gigabytes of vram each for combined next you have the D 500s and those each have three gigabytes of vram so six in total and then you have the D 700 s now those are based off of the fire Pro W 8000 I believe which was a workstation card that came out in 2013 and it was essentially an under clocked version of those it has six gigabytes of vram each for a 12 combined it's really really expensive to buy a trash can Mac Pro that has those graphics they are so proprietary that these custom boards that are made specifically for this machine you can upgrade them but only with other Mac Pro graphics so you could put a D 500 or D 700 cards in this Mac Pro and upgrade the graphics that way but they're so unbelievably expensive that it's not worth it hey guys hey hey guys don't grade the graphics so six hundred and thirty-two where does that put it well actually that pretty much puts it within spitting range of something like a Radeon pro 560 X which is a pretty low-end graphics card you could probably beat this with like an RX 5 to 60 or 570 heck my late 2013 iMac over there which has GTX 780 M graphics would would outperform this pretty easily hey there it's me your old pal brand Luke like normal Luke but brand I'm here to tell you guys about privacy comm a great way to keep your personal information safe and secure by using virtual credit cards instead of real ones in addition to the free account which lets you use up to 12 virtual credit cards per month privacy has now launched two paid versions pro and teams the pro account costs $10 per month and comes with everything included in the free personal plan plus an additional 1% cash back on all purchases up to 36 cards per month and more security and privacy features teams on the other hand costs $25 a month gives you access to everything that is included in the pro version plus you get a dedicated Account Manager access to 60 cards a month and transaction limits tailored to your business needs regardless of which plan you choose you can get a free $5 just by signing up at privacy comm slash Luke me on e with the link in the description below and there's no credit card required to sign up you mischievous little thing you why the heck is this a $1,200 computer well there's no competition there's no other option here think about it this way let's say you want a Mac you want a desktop and you want to have your own monitor what options are there well there's the Mac Mini and this and that's it and the Mac Mini doesn't even have dedicated graphics where this does at the very least they're not good in fact you could say they're quite terrible but at least it has something for 1,200 bucks you can buy yourself a 6 core Mac Mini either the i5 or the i7 that's going to demolish this Mac Pro however there are a few advantages to the Mac Pro over something like a Mac Mini have you ever tried to get inside a Mac Mini can be a bit of a hassle watch this it's pretty easy to get inside of this thing now as weird and non-standard as the Mac Pro is it's actually decently upgradable and you can see right over here we have an upgradable SSD now o WC sells some big chunky boys that you can put in here that will allow you to put 2 terabytes in this Mac Pro so that is very interesting you can also upgrade the RAM the RAM is very easy it uses pretty standard ddr3 1866 megahertz ECC Ram so it's not that expensive or difficult to upgrade the RAM in here and then of course there's the processor now this is in my opinion the biggest drawback to something like this particular machine because that quad-core processor is hot garbage quite literally hot garbage this computers quite warm but with a significant amount of disassembly and manual labor you can actually upgrade the CPUs so you could put a 12 core processor in here at the very least you can upgrade the CPU in this Mac Pro so that's what I'm gonna do you think I would mention upgrading the CP you and then not do it what is this communist Russia of course we're gonna do it so make sure to stay tuned for that video where I'm going to make what is I'm pretty sure the least-expensive 12-core trashcan Mac Pro that has ever been made or sold huh man not again it looks like normal Luke forgot to film an outro for this video that guy is such an idiot so while I don't think this Mac Pro is a good value I'm gonna withhold judgment until the next video when we do some upgrades to see if maybe something changes then in the meantime I think it would be really awesome if Apple were to launch a Mac Mini Pro sort of in this same footprint but with dedicated graphics and more modern hardware I think that would sell really well so that's gonna do it for this video as usual make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Luke neon II please consider checking out my subreddit in the description below if you have any questions and I'll see you all in the next videoover the past year I've talked a lot of smack about the trashcan MacPro and you know honestly I felt bad I want to give it a fair chance so I bought one and we're gonna see if it's still as bad as everyone thinks it is this video is sponsored by privacy with privacy you can buy things online using virtual credit cards instead of real ones protecting your identity and bank information on the Internet as the special treat privacy is offering you guys at free five dollars just for signing up by heading over to privacy calm slash Luke my Ani look at this tiny box sorry anyway a couple of weeks ago I made a video about the stubbornly high prices for the trashcan Mac Pro and I was just so confused and quite frankly a little bit frustrated by how expensive these things are given that they're six years outdated in terms of the hardware and yes I know they sold them up until like two months ago so many people on eBay they're like who will I put mine in 2017 so if you're a watcher of the channel you may remember almost a year ago in I think it was April 2019 I want the cheapest trashcan Mac Pro on eBay to see if it was any good I paid $1,300 I got a 6 core model now weirdly enough that computer still to this day was probably the best deal I would still have picked that over this if it had been available so let's unbox this and I'll tell you what I got because this is the weirdest situation I'm talking about a video that I made almost a year ago and it still was the best deal arguably on a 2013 trashcan Mac Pro how is that even possible how is it possible that this computer didn't depreciate at all over the course of a year that's crazy all right here it comes there we go there it is so what is it well this was 1,200 bucks the cheapest Mac Pro that I could find on eBay and it's not that special whenever I try to make videos about buying the cheapest of something I try to find something unique something special like oh it's the cheapest but it's super upgraded this is pretty much stock except for one upgrade this is the quad core model yeah you heard that right quad core it's got 16 gigabytes of RAM and it's got the d300 based graphics the only thing that's upgraded is it has a 512 gigabyte SSD which actually now that I mention it why don't we check out here that looks like a factory Apple SSD and it looks like we have the factory Ram as well so this has pretty much been upgraded only through Apple nothing has been done after the fact it's honestly not that good not that good on paper so why don't we go and see if there's anything redeeming once we get this thing booted up all right let's fire up the old girl mmm smells like computers oh look at that no no I don't want to use voiceover stop it Lana all of this is getting cut out all right so I've downloaded some benchmarks we're gonna start off the test with Geekbench 4 just to sort of get a baseline of where this thing Falls so this computer has a xeon e5 1620 v 2 it's honestly a pretty low-end quad-core processor and it should perform similarly to a core i7 3770 or a 3770k oh oh dear that's not good 14600 and 6 with under 4000 in the single core so single core pretty weak as you would expect it's older that means we were being significantly outperformed by the base model 13-inch MacBook Pro Yates so Senate bench our 20 should give us a better idea of multi-core performance and as a measure of how well it's doing we'll see how hot it gets twelve hundred bucks for a quad core it's crazy there's a core i7 4850 HQ on there 2.3 gigahertz it's cores 1509 so that would be a late 2013 15-inch MacBook Pro and then 1647 on there is what they have for a core i7 6700 HQ which would be a base model late 2016 MacBook Pro now both of those are mobile processors and this is a Xeon even though it's a little older I'd like to think that at the very least we can beat those hopefully oh no oh no that's not good fourteen seventy six so what that means is that this which is an overpriced three year old laptop beats it handily and this which is a well priced six year old laptop also beats it so that's not good this is half the price and you're getting pretty much the same CPU performance out of this old-ass laptop so what I want to do next is test out the graphics by the way if you want to see how this computer compares to your system for example run Unigine heaven on the extreme preset and we'll get comparable numbers leave those down in the comments below what does your computer get and how much did you pay for it so what we're on the subject of graphics why don't we talk about the weird graphics situation in this trashcan Mac Pro all of these trashcan Mac Pros have dual graphics this one is the base model and it has the d 300 graphics so that's dual d300s they have two gigabytes of vram each for combined next you have the D 500s and those each have three gigabytes of vram so six in total and then you have the D 700 s now those are based off of the fire Pro W 8000 I believe which was a workstation card that came out in 2013 and it was essentially an under clocked version of those it has six gigabytes of vram each for a 12 combined it's really really expensive to buy a trash can Mac Pro that has those graphics they are so proprietary that these custom boards that are made specifically for this machine you can upgrade them but only with other Mac Pro graphics so you could put a D 500 or D 700 cards in this Mac Pro and upgrade the graphics that way but they're so unbelievably expensive that it's not worth it hey guys hey hey guys don't grade the graphics so six hundred and thirty-two where does that put it well actually that pretty much puts it within spitting range of something like a Radeon pro 560 X which is a pretty low-end graphics card you could probably beat this with like an RX 5 to 60 or 570 heck my late 2013 iMac over there which has GTX 780 M graphics would would outperform this pretty easily hey there it's me your old pal brand Luke like normal Luke but brand I'm here to tell you guys about privacy comm a great way to keep your personal information safe and secure by using virtual credit cards instead of real ones in addition to the free account which lets you use up to 12 virtual credit cards per month privacy has now launched two paid versions pro and teams the pro account costs $10 per month and comes with everything included in the free personal plan plus an additional 1% cash back on all purchases up to 36 cards per month and more security and privacy features teams on the other hand costs $25 a month gives you access to everything that is included in the pro version plus you get a dedicated Account Manager access to 60 cards a month and transaction limits tailored to your business needs regardless of which plan you choose you can get a free $5 just by signing up at privacy comm slash Luke me on e with the link in the description below and there's no credit card required to sign up you mischievous little thing you why the heck is this a $1,200 computer well there's no competition there's no other option here think about it this way let's say you want a Mac you want a desktop and you want to have your own monitor what options are there well there's the Mac Mini and this and that's it and the Mac Mini doesn't even have dedicated graphics where this does at the very least they're not good in fact you could say they're quite terrible but at least it has something for 1,200 bucks you can buy yourself a 6 core Mac Mini either the i5 or the i7 that's going to demolish this Mac Pro however there are a few advantages to the Mac Pro over something like a Mac Mini have you ever tried to get inside a Mac Mini can be a bit of a hassle watch this it's pretty easy to get inside of this thing now as weird and non-standard as the Mac Pro is it's actually decently upgradable and you can see right over here we have an upgradable SSD now o WC sells some big chunky boys that you can put in here that will allow you to put 2 terabytes in this Mac Pro so that is very interesting you can also upgrade the RAM the RAM is very easy it uses pretty standard ddr3 1866 megahertz ECC Ram so it's not that expensive or difficult to upgrade the RAM in here and then of course there's the processor now this is in my opinion the biggest drawback to something like this particular machine because that quad-core processor is hot garbage quite literally hot garbage this computers quite warm but with a significant amount of disassembly and manual labor you can actually upgrade the CPUs so you could put a 12 core processor in here at the very least you can upgrade the CPU in this Mac Pro so that's what I'm gonna do you think I would mention upgrading the CP you and then not do it what is this communist Russia of course we're gonna do it so make sure to stay tuned for that video where I'm going to make what is I'm pretty sure the least-expensive 12-core trashcan Mac Pro that has ever been made or sold huh man not again it looks like normal Luke forgot to film an outro for this video that guy is such an idiot so while I don't think this Mac Pro is a good value I'm gonna withhold judgment until the next video when we do some upgrades to see if maybe something changes then in the meantime I think it would be really awesome if Apple were to launch a Mac Mini Pro sort of in this same footprint but with dedicated graphics and more modern hardware I think that would sell really well so that's gonna do it for this video as usual make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Luke neon II please consider checking out my subreddit in the description below if you have any questions and I'll see you all in the next video\n"