Apple’s New Mac and OS Overhaul – Lil’ Mac

As you’re probably aware from all the recent internet-chatter and debate, Apple at their Worldwide Developers Confrence have announced a brand new cylindrical, speedy and dare-we-say futuristic Mac Pro, that sits at only 10 inches tall. 

This oddly shaped hub houses some very speedy innards – 1866mhz DDR3 RAM and multiple Intel Xeon CPUs with up to 12 cores. Apple also boast that the new Mac will also be the first computer that can output 4k video with dual AMD FirePro graphics cards.

What does this mean for us music makers? Well the new hardware cannot be modified and all additions must be done via the 4 USB 3 ports, or the six Thunderbolt 2 ports, which although exchange data at an impressive 20Gbps we might add they result in the added cost of having to buy the right leads for connectivity. We do regard Apple adopting Thunderbolt 2 as standard ‘a good thing’ though generally. You’ll be able to connect an external PCi chassis using this technology as well, so hope is not completely lost for all you modders!

There is also no optical media drive so all those CD-ROMs and DVDs you’ll have to re-purpose as coasters, unless you fork out for an additional disk drive that you can add externally.

As well as the physical changes, Apple’s new OS reboots the scary-cats naming method of their previous releases. ‘Mavericks’ which features a range of new interface changes and handy file-tagging applications.

We’ll bring you more info on the new Mac soon, we’re cautiously optimistic that the speed and capabilities of Apple’s new flagship model will be more than able to deal with modern music processing tasks! However the inability to modify the internal mechanics does beg the question of whether it’s as future-proof as Apple would have you believe…