We all know the internet - by which we mostly mean the globe-girdling network of wires, cables, wireless beams and computers we have all come to know, depend on, love and sometimes loathe - has wrought enormous change in our lives. Along the way it has disrupted, overturned and irrevocably changed many previously comfortable industries, not least the one in which I have spent my working life. But it has also opened vast opportunities for those bright enough and brave enough to join the throng.
Over the past three or four decades, computational power has increased enormously and the cost of it has dropped dramatically. The first Macintosh in 1984 had no hard drive, a 400KB floppy disk drive, 128KB of RAM and, by present standards, a laughably puny 8MHz microprocessor. It cost $5000, the price of a car in those days.
For fewer dollars, which today have a much-reduced value from three decades ago, one may now buy a beefed-up Mac Pro desktop machine dripping with power and features; possibly the most powerful production computer ever built.
Compared with previous big-muscle Macs, such as the G4 and G5 desktop towers, this new, very shiny, very black, Mac Pro is small, remarkably expandable, and quiet. It is the harbinger of further change in our lives because it delivers to talented people with skills and ideas, at prices they can afford, extraordinary computing speed and power.
It can run three 4K video displays simultaneously and handle up to 16 streams of 4K video, the equivalent of 64 standard HD streams. It has four USB 3.0 ports, two gigabit Ethernet ports and a whopping six Thunderbolt 2.0 ports.
It comes in two standard configurations - a base model, priced at $3999, which has a 3.7GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor, 12GB of RAM, two powerful AMD Firepro graphics cards and 256GB of PCIe flash storage. For another $1300 you get a six-core Xeon, 16GB of RAM, but the same sized flash drive.
Given that my MacBook Air has 512GB of flash storage, the slab of memory in the Mac Pro doesn't sound very impressive. But that's to ignore the 20GB of data per second that can be shifted to and from external drives through each of its six Thunderbolt ports. And each of those ports can support a daisy chain of up to six peripherals.
Everything is easily reachable to upgrade - RAM slots, the solid state drive and even the graphics cards, though they are not currently upgradeable.
If money is no object, the Mac Pro can be boosted to a 12-core Xeon processor, 64GB of memory, one terabyte of flash storage and, lo, for about $10,000 you have a rocket ship Peter Jackson would admire.
It weighs only five kilograms and stands 25 centimetres tall.
But the real point about computers is what you can do with them; how fast and efficiently, and with the Mac Pro the prospect is stunning.
Consider for instance the change that has occurred in the various forms of video entertainment we enjoy. Many people watch YouTube and other online video services more than their TVs. Some video addicts watch their TV and YouTube on an iPad simultaneously. Video content on the internet is now huge. Our ABC and Britain's BBC, ad agencies and scads of professionals make extensive use of the internet and on YouTube many of the biggest hits go to mere amateurs.
YouTube says it has more than 1 billion unique visitors each month and that more than 6 billion hours of video are watched on its channel every month. On the production side, 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and the figure is still climbing.
What then for the future if keen amateur moviemakers begin pushing out 4K clips assembled, edited and rendered on their Mac Pro? What if you had a bunch of journalists clubbing together to produce local rivals to mainstream television's news feeds from their own resources and aggregating stuff from amateurs using iPhones and camcorders? Suddenly the local butcher and baker could be advertising to a good audience on internet TV.
Apple's 30th-anniversary movie, an exquisitely edited 90-second (from 70 hours of footage) production, shot entirely on iPhone 5s devices, shows what can be done with relatively basic equipment in the field and real computing muscle in the production room.
Of course, this trend is already under way, but with really powerful computers producing high-quality output, who knows where it could go - no, where it will go.
