The Mac Pro 2013 - when nostalgia finally catches up with you
It's a self-experiment paired with a hefty dose of nostalgia. My first Mac was the iMac G3 in Bondi Blue, I always wanted the iMac G4 (the “lamp”) and found the silver PowerMac G4 instead, with which the Mac journey then continued.
Some designs are iconic: that of the first iMac G3, that of the G4 Cube - but also that of the 2013 iteration of the Mac Pro, commonly known as the “trash can”. But is the performance still right in today's world?
The models have changed over the years, but even in the age of Apple Silicon, I still have enough nostalgia in me that the good old “Thrashcan” from 2013 was always in focus and the attraction of buying it second-hand was omnipresent.
At the beginning of December, I was able to purchase the Mac Pro 2013 with a 2.7 Ghz 12-core Xeon processor, 24 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD and two dual AMD FirePro D500 graphics units for EUR 350. At a time when the current Mac mini is twice as expensive in its basic configuration and offers many times the performance, this was of course a bold investment (exclusively) for enthusiasts.
Admittedly, even under Monterey - if you're used to the latest Apple hardware - you have to be a little patient if you're familiar with the current product range. As a small comparison, an Apple Silicon M1 from 2020 (an SoC that was one of the most drastic hardware changes in history for me) is around four times faster than this workstation from 2013 with twelve Xeon cores and two graphics cards - not to mention the current M4. This slows things down a little, but thanks to various restrictions (iCloud account etc.), Monterey could not remain the first choice.
So it's time for a series about a visual gem and the question of whether and in what way the “trash can” is still suitable for the desktop in the outgoing year 2024!