The new Mac Pro offers an option for those users whose workloads can benefit from having more cores, memory and GPU performance. The latest version of Final Cut Pro as well as the rest of Apple’s professional apps do a great job of splitting their work across multiple CPU cores. Even simple tasks like importing photos into iPhoto or Lightroom is extremely well threaded these days. It’s in these workloads where a 6, 8 or 12-core Mac Pro can offer a healthy performance advantage.

For many years, “pro” meant a big, expandable tower case, lots of internal storage, replaceable graphics cards, and so on. For Apple, it now means “maximum performance when using pro apps.”

The new Mac Pro is an undeniably serious and powerful machine aimed at professionals. But it's also incredibly expensive, and at least from my Adobe-centric perspective, it's not quite worth the outlay right now. The day-to-day performance is similar enough to that of the iMac that I'd have a difficult time convincing my boss to spend double the money on this computer, plus a monitor, plus the Thunderbolt peripherals I'd need to make it a viable solution — at least, not until Adobe makes its suite shine on the new hardware the way Final Cut Pro X does. At the end of the day, I'm back to hoping, but this time that third-party developers step up.

It's hard to say if the Mac Pro is pricey, per se, given that there's nothing else quite like it. There are plenty of Windows-based workstations, certainly, but none are quite this small or quite this portable (many aren't quite this quiet, either). And if you're a creative professional already hooked into Mac-only apps like Final Cut Pro, this is really your only choice: The new Mac Pro is a serious improvement over the old model in every way, and is likely worth the upgrade.

For anyone who’s been looking forward to a replacement for their aging gray tower Mac Pro, and for anyone who has the money and is willing to spend it, the Mac Pro is a no-brainer, but for the rest of us, we needn’t reach quite so high to touch the sky when it comes to Apple’s line of OS X hardware.

It's hard not to be wowed by the Mac Pro. Apple has created a workstation that breaks new ground in design, delivers power in excess of PCs several times its size, and doesn't leave your office sounding like a turbine hall in the process. That it carries a premium price comes as little surprise given its position in Apple's range; that it delivers so comprehensively is what leaves us recommending it to those with the need and the budget for superlative performance.