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A Standing O for Apple's New Mac Pro

Apple's new machine is long overdue and maybe now the competition will finally step up.

New Apple 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!

Apple review, Apple commentary, Apple news... Everything Apple 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.

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 monitors—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.

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About John C. Dvorak

Columnist, PCMag.com

John C. Dvorak is a columnist for PCMag.com and the co-host of the twice weekly podcast, the No Agenda Show. His work is licensed around the world. Previously a columnist for Forbes, PC/Computing, Computer Shopper, MacUser, Barrons, the DEC Professional as well as other newspapers and magazines. Former editor and consulting editor for InfoWorld, he also appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, Philadelphia Enquirer, SF Examiner, and the Vancouver Sun. He was on the start-up team for C/Net as well as ZDTV. At ZDTV (and TechTV) he hosted Silicon Spin for four years doing 1000 live and live-to-tape TV shows. His Internet show Cranky Geeks was considered a classic. John was on public radio for 8 years and has written over 5000 articles and columns as well as authoring or co-authoring 14 books. He's the 2004 Award winner of the American Business Editors Association's national gold award for best online column of 2003. That was followed up by an unprecedented second national gold award from the ABEA in 2005, again for the best online column (for 2004). He also won the Silver National Award for best magazine column in 2006 as well as other awards. Follow him on Twitter @therealdvorak.

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