Mac Pro (2006)

Unveiled at WWDC in August 2006, the Mac Pro completed Apple's Intel transition by replacing the Power Mac G5, the last Mac still running PowerPC silicon. Housed in the same iconic aluminum cheese-grater tower first introduced with the Power Mac G5 in 2003, the Mac Pro swapped IBM's PowerPC chips for dual Intel Xeon 'Woodcrest' processors, giving professionals up to four cores across two physical sockets at speeds from 2.0GHz to 3.0GHz. This was a colossal leap for workstation-class computing tasks, benchmark suites of the era showed the Mac Pro besting the outgoing Quad G5 handily in nearly every professional workload, from video rendering in Final Cut Pro to 3D rendering and scientific computation, while also running dramatically cooler and quieter thanks to Intel's more efficient architecture compared to the power-hungry PowerPC G5. It retained the expandability professionals demanded: four internal hard drive bays, multiple PCI Express slots, and easily accessible RAM and processor trays, continuing the tower's reputation as one of the most serviceable, tool-free designs in desktop computing. For the professional audience of video editors, audio engineers, scientists, and 3D artists who had grown frustrated watching Apple's PowerPC roadmap stall out well short of the long-promised 3GHz G5, the Mac Pro was a profound relief, finally delivering performance competitive with, and often exceeding, equivalent Windows and even Linux workstations built around the same Xeon silicon. It could also dual-boot Windows via Boot Camp, introduced that same year, opening the Mac Pro to professionals who needed Windows-only tools alongside their creative software. Critics noted the steep starting price and that the move to Intel meant losing some of the specialized PowerPC-optimized software until Universal Binary versions caught up, but almost no one seriously mourned the G5's departure once they saw the Mac Pro's benchmarks. It marked the symbolic end of an era, no more PowerPC Macs would ever be sold again, and the beginning of a Mac Pro dynasty defined by raw workstation power that would continue, largely in this same cheese-grater enclosure, all the way through 2012 before Apple's radical 2013 'trash can' redesign.