Turns out the new $6,000 Mac Pro isn't a very good cheese grater

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Apple is now two for two with its Mac Pro designs: Specifically, it has a perfect record of making Mac Pros that look like everyday household objects, but do not actually function as those objects. In 2013, Apple designed a very sleek, cylindrical Mac Pro that looked like Darth Vader's trashcan. But you couldn't put trash in it! Disappointing, but not as disappointing as this 2019 Mac Pro redesign. This year Apple went back to the tower design, making a system that looks a lot more like a PC and the Mac Pros of old... except with a cheese grater on the front?

An average cheese grater costs about $10, and is very good at grating both cheese and knuckles. The $6,000 Mac Pro, on the other hand, doesn't so much grate the cheese as just slice off chunks of it, which get firmly lodged in the grille.

Presumably this computer is very good at rendering video and doing other things that you need an extreme workstation for. It better be, considering if you fully kit it out, it costs a ludicrous $53,000. But no matter how much you spend it's not good at grating cheese, the one thing it looks like it should be very good at doing. I'm excited to see the next Apple design that keeps this streak going.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).