The main highlight for me was the release of the Mac Pro. I’ve always built my own systems in Windows and have long wanted a Mac where I could install my own graphics card, memory, storage, etc. The 2019 Mac Pro is an engineering marvel, and definitely my favorite product of 2019.
I didn’t purchase a new iPhone this year. I did purchase a new Mac, but it was a slightly older one. In September my main computer system had the motherboard go out. It was a Windows computer working alongside a Mac mini. I needed a computer soon and at that time the Mac Pro was not in sight.
I purchased the 2017 iMac Pro, and, truly, it’s the best computer I’ve ever owned, and my personal Apple highlight of 2019. There are many reasons it deserves the “Pro” in its name. It has four microphones which makes recording sound full and rich. There are two speakers that are very loud. They are actually too loud to be played at full volume, but if you do, there is no distortion whatsoever.
There are two fans cooling the system vs. the one in standard iMacs. My daily workload consists of multiple windows open– I have World of Warcraft running, I always view one and sometimes two other Macs on the network via screen sharing. I record and usually stream my game play, and usually have one virtual machine open running Windows. With all this running at the same time, I use about 7% CPU and never hear the fans or even feel warm air.
There is the T2 chip which controls the security of the iMac Pro by encrypting the disk. It will not let a person erase the SSD until the Apple ID and password of the owner are known. The T2 chip also controls disk I/O and audio, offloading these from the CPU. The CPU is a Xeon W workstation class cpu. It has four USB A, two USB C ports and a 10 Gibibyte network connector.
All these make it a true Pro computer deserving the name iMac Pro. And, it’s space gray which looks great. This is “old” technology but has been a great 2019 Apple pick for me.
