There are three additional USB 2.0 ports on the back, giving the Mac Pro a total of five USB 2.0 and four FireWire ports. Proving that there’s never enough of a good thing, the Mac Pro increases that number from two to four: There are now two USB 2.0 ports on the front, and one each of FireWire 400 and 800. With the G5, Apple finally gave Mac users easy-to-access USB, FireWire, and headphone ports on the front of the case. During the introduction of DVD burners, it was useful to have both a state-of-the art CD burner and a newfangled DVD drive, and I expect the same to hold true during the transition to these new optical formats. Although this seems a bit excessive today, the choice makes a bit more sense when you consider that we’re on the cusp of a whole new generation of optical drives in the form of the high-capacity HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats. The drives attach directly to the Mac Pro’s motherboard, so you don’t need to fiddle with cables-the housings are designed so the drives slide smoothly back and into place.Īlso hearkening back to the last generation of Power Mac G4 systems, the Mac Pro’s optical drive bay has room for two full-size optical drives. It’s easy to install a new drive in a Mac Pro: just slide out an empty drive housing (the Mac Pro ships with four housings, even if you buy only one internal drive), attach a SATA drive to it with four included screws, and slide the drive back into the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro can hold four Serial ATA (SATA) drives, up from the G5’s maximum of two. Thanks to the Mac Pro’s dramatically cooler Intel Xeon processors, Apple’s been able to reclaim space from the cooling system and contribute it toward internal storage. As a result, even though the G5’s internal volume was much larger than the Power Mac G4’s, it was a step back when it came to storage, offering space for only two drives. The Power Mac G5’s internal design was dictated by the need to cool the super-hot G5 processors. While Apple’s left the external design alone, it’s addressed the G5 line’s greatest shortcomings with the Mac Pro. Until the spring of 2007, and most Mac software still isn’t able to take advantage of the four processor cores that power these machines.Īlthough the Mac Pro doesn’t share the name of its predecessor, the Power Mac G5 (

Graphics professionals who rely on Adobe’s Creative Suite of applications won’t be able to run them natively on the Mac Pro That makes these systems just about the best high-performance workstations money can buy-and potentially overkill for people who aren’t working in one of those fields.Īlso arrives in a world of software that’s still in flux. The Mac Pro excels at the tasks you’d expect for a system targeted at the high-end professional market: computation-intensive, heavily multithreaded tasks such as 3-D rendering, scientific computing, and professional audio and video production. Of high-end desktop Macs marks the end of its

Apple mac pro g5