I received my late 2013 black cylinder Mac Pro last Monday. I ordered the 6-core model with D700 GPUs, since the higher-core models can’t Turbo boost to the full 3.9GHz the 4-core and 6-core ones can, and thus for most poorly-parallelized apps will underperform. I had to get a Promise Pegasus J4 with a pair of Samsung 840 Evo SSDs to hold my files, as I need nearly 2TB to do so and that is not available on the internal SSD, and it would be a shame to hobble this machine with spinning rust.

Some notes I have not seen in the many reviews sloshing around the Internet this far:

• It is not actually black, rather a dark metallic gray, the color of hematite.
• The TOSlink digital optical out is now capable of 192kHZ/24 bit audio, whereas the old Mac Pro was limited to 96 kHz. Unfortunately, it is very hard to find POF cables and DACs that can reliably sustain that data rate.
• It is dead quiet compared to the old Mac Pro, and even my work iMac.

All in all, a remarkable engineering feat. A HP Z820 may have more memory capacity, expandability and total horsepower in its BMW-designed case, but Apple is the one pushing the envelope in terms of design.