Upgrade to an old MacPro

The new MacPro is a thing of beauty and proves that Apple can still innovate. When it was launched 18 months or so ago, Phil Schiller made us all laugh with his "can't innovate my arse" line (see https://www.apple.com/apple-events/october-2013/).

The new MacPro

But for home project studio owners, upgrading to one presents several problems.

1. It's the most expensive MacPro in our memory at £2,400 for the base model.
2. You cannot install your old eSATA drives into it. You have to buy a Thunderbolt expansion chassis. Yes, it's expensive too.
3. You may not be able to use your old audio interface if it connects viaFireWire.
4. You'll need a Thunderbolt PCIe expansion chassis if you need to use a PCIe card with it such as the Universal Audio UAD. Expensive? Don't get us started!

Despite these issues, today eBay returned 14,438 results when we searched "Mac Pro", and only a handful are the new model. It's a buyers market with many low prices. Clearly owners are trying to offload old machines before upgrading.

MacPro's selling on eBay

So what does this mean for us? Clearly there has never been a better time to switch from a PC or upgrade from an iMac and take advantage of Logic Pro X on a multi-core MacPro.

Anything from a mid 2010 model (5.1) onwards will work well (there are 281 on eBay today). Our 2010 MacPro has 2 x quad core Xenon processors, 26Gb of RAM, 4 eSATA internal HD's and barely shows 20% CPU usage on an average mix session. Adding RAM and HDs is not expensive and the only downside is that Apple may not support the model for new versions of OSX for much longer. At present, although we haven't installed it, Yosemite is supported.

A 2010 MacPro

If you can get one for under £600, we'd call that a bargain. eBay shows many models with high prices but we're pretty sure they won't sell. Hold out and you'll get the right one at the right price.

Therefore, we can't see a good reason to upgrade to the new MacPro yet, unless you are a video editor using Final Cut Pro X.

So, upgrading to old technology isn't always about buying old valve compressors. Embrace a vintage MacPro instead!

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