Apple Mac Pro: here is one professional category in which no other computer performs better
The Apple Mac Pro was designed in a time in which Apple was still very much invested in creating professional workstations with high-end specs, when no one else did anymore, since the glory days of Silicon Graphics.
Movie studios, and many high-profile graphic production companies worldwide, still invested, somewhat, in high-end machines, up until the Mac Pro was introduced in 2012, however, Apple had the foresight to halt future designs of the Mac Pro, beyond its shiny new incarnation, mostly due to the fact that high-end production companies had specific needs that could only be met by flexible customized systems, designed and assembled in-house, while everyone else who didn’t need the massive hardware specs of the Mac Pro, did just fine with the Apple iMac.
With that said, there is still one category where the Apple Mac Pro is absolutely, and undeniably indispensable, and that is: the large-format print industry.
Processing power is important, and fortunately, there is no shortage of powerful CPUs and GPUs, like the latest Intel Core i7 Skylake, or the AMD FX. With that in mind, processing power is not everything. RAM is a huge factor to consider, when working in large format print, in which there is no such thing as “enough RAM”.
What is “Large format print”, you ask? Large format print is any artwork that is printed over an area that is far larger than the average letter-size piece of printing paper.
Examples can be as common as the graphics printed on a commercial vehicle, and as big as a highway billboard. Some large-format printed artworks can be found inside automobile dealers, restaurants, or night clubs. Typically, these pieces are printed on massive sheets of vinyl, using a specialized large format printer, from massive graphic files, usually created in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator.
The size of these files, especially is they contain photographs, or high-density graphic illustrations, like a painting or a computer-generated pattern, can range from as little as 500-600 Megabytes, to several Gigabytes, at which point they can no longer be handled by any average desktop computer. These files need to be handled by a machine with serious chops.
What makes the Apple Mac Pro stand out, is that Apple’s high-end workstation supports as much as 64GB of RAM, while most desktop computers, commercially sold, ship with a maximum of 32GB of RAM.
Even if one were to build a custom machine capable of supporting any amount of RAM over 32GB, the choices would still be rather limited, as there are only a few mainboard models that support 64GB, and even more rarely, 128GB of RAM, which is very unusual for a consumer-grade mainboard.
This puts the Mac Pro at a tremendous advantage in a field where professionals need to manipulate extremely large graphic files, often hundreds of feet wide, with resolution ranging from 100ppi to 300ppi,
By this token, creative professionals who provide large format graphic design services, tend to choose the Mac Pro, unless they have the necessary technical know-how to build a custom system with the exact specifications they need.
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