Mac Pro (2019)

The 2019 Mac Pro was Apple's very public act of contrition after years of professional user frustration with the 2013 "trash can" design's thermal limits and lack of internal expansion. Announced alongside an unusual pre-launch roundtable where Apple executives openly admitted the cylindrical Mac Pro had "designed itself into a thermal corner," the new machine returned to a large, modular tower chassis instantly nicknamed the "cheese grater" for its perforated stainless steel lattice sides, evoking the beloved aluminum towers of the 2006-2012 era. Built around Intel Xeon W processors with up to 28 cores, a full-size PCIe expansion architecture supporting up to eight slots via Apple's proprietary MPX Module system, and support for a staggering 1.5TB of RAM, this Mac Pro was an unapologetic return to genuine professional expandability, letting users install standard graphics cards, add storage, and upgrade components in ways the 2013 model had made difficult or impossible. The standout new component was the Afterburner card, a custom Apple-designed FPGA accelerator capable of decoding several streams of ProRes RAW video in real time, a feature aimed squarely at high-end film and broadcast professionals who represented the Mac Pro's core audience. All of this ambition came at a steep price, with the entry configuration starting at $5,999 and fully loaded configurations easily exceeding $50,000, drawing some sticker-shock criticism, and the companion Pro Display XDR monitor's $999 stand became an instant meme for perceived Apple excess. Nonetheless, professional reviewers and the pro community broadly welcomed the return to modularity as exactly what had been missing for six years, even as they debated whether such an expensive, niche machine made sense for most buyers versus the more affordable iMac Pro. In hindsight, the 2019 Mac Pro represents the last great expression of Intel-era Mac Pro philosophy, an approach Apple would carry the chassis design of, but meaningfully constrain in expansion options, when it transitioned this same tower to Apple Silicon with the M2 Ultra model in 2023.