Mac Pro (2019)
The 'cheese grater' returns. Ultimate expandability — up to 1.5TB RAM, dual AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo GPUs.
Apple apologized in public and then built this. At an unusual pre-launch roundtable, executives admitted the cylindrical Mac Pro had designed itself into a thermal corner. The replacement went back to a large modular tower with perforated stainless steel sides that everyone immediately called the cheese grater, which is what they had called the 2006 aluminum towers. Xeon W processors up to 28 cores, up to 1.5TB of RAM, and a full PCIe architecture with as many as eight slots through Apple's MPX module system. You could fit standard graphics cards, add storage, and upgrade things, all of which the 2013 machine had made difficult or impossible. Afterburner was the genuinely new part. A custom Apple FPGA card decoding several streams of ProRes RAW in real time, aimed directly at film and broadcast. It started at $5,999 and a loaded one passed $50,000. The $999 monitor stand became a meme within minutes of being announced. Professionals welcomed the modularity anyway, having waited six years for it, while arguing about whether a machine this expensive made sense next to an iMac Pro.
Mac History Timeline
Full Specifications
Availability
Processor
Memory
Storage
Display
Graphics
Expansion
Connectivity
Physical
Processor Deep Dive
Intel Xeon W (Cascade Lake)
IntelThese Cascade Lake-based Xeon W processors scaled up to 28 cores with support for AVX-512 instructions and enormous memory bandwidth, targeting the most demanding rendering, simulation, and video workloads. Compared to AMD's competing Epyc and Threadripper Pro chips, which by 2019 offered more cores per dollar, Intel's Xeon W still held workstation-market maturity and certified driver support advantages that many professional software vendors relied on. This was among the last high-end Xeon workstation chips Apple would use before transitioning the Mac Pro entirely to its own Apple Silicon in 2023.
Compatible Operating Systems
macOS Catalina 10.15.1
Launch OS2019
Launched as the debut OS for the modular 2019 Mac Pro.
macOS Big Sur 11
Compatible2020
Brought a major visual redesign and Afterburner card optimizations.
macOS Monterey 12
Compatible2021
Continued full official support two years after this Mac Pro's debut.
macOS Ventura 13
Compatible2022
One of the later releases still officially supporting this Xeon-based tower.
macOS Sonoma 14
Compatible2023
Released the same year Apple launched the Apple Silicon Mac Pro alongside it.
macOS Sequoia 15
Compatible2024
Continued to receive full official Apple support five years after launch.
macOS Sequoia 15
Max Supported2024
Remains among the most recently supported Intel Mac Pro configurations.
Reviews & Reception
The 2019 Mac Pro was celebrated as a triumphant return to professional-grade modularity, despite some sticker shock over its steep pricing.
Apple has clearly listened to years of professional frustration here. Real internal expansion, real PCIe slots, this is the Mac Pro power users have wanted since 2013.
The Afterburner card is a genuinely impressive piece of custom engineering for video professionals, though the eye-watering price will put this machine out of reach for most.
This is an unapologetic, maximalist workstation, and it's refreshing to see Apple embrace modularity again after the compromises of the 2013 design.
The thousand-dollar monitor stand became the story, but underneath the jokes is a genuinely capable, expandable pro machine that finally corrects course from the trash can era.