The recently unveiled Mac Pro is no doubt a gorgeous machine, engineered for a very particular group of people. While it will likely be a great machine for those who live and breathe within Finalcut and work with ProRes files, it’s overkill for a good developer machine.

So instead of spending $5,999 before tax on the base level Mac Pro, here’s a list of [brand new!] things to buy instead:

A Galaxy S10 for testing Samsung Internet / high-end Android experiences - $899

A Pixel 3A for testing the relatively low-end Android experience (or to just play with ‘vanilla’ Android) - $399

An iPhone Xr for natively testing iOS applications - $749

A Mac Mini for building/testing iOS applications - $799.00

A mobile development ultrabook: XPS 13/Lenovo X1 Carbon - Starting at $899.99

A great 27”4K Monitor (I use this one) - $399.99

Windows PC with Ryzen3000 series CPU (or Threadripper!) with Turing supported GPU for playing with machine learning: the remaining ~$1,800 budget

Now that monitor on the other hand...