Upgrading 2012 Mac Pro for graphic design, photography, and gaming work

Question

Upgrading 2012 Mac Pro for graphic design, photography, and gaming work

I need advice on how to upgrade from my 2012 Mac Pro.

My wife and I had a graphic design business and we still do work for clients occasionally using Adobe CC. I also do photography and use Photoshop and Lightroom to manage my photos and printing. We also use Office 365 suite. We currently have 8tb of data that is stored on two hard drives in a soft RAID 1 configuration for redundancy and we use Time Machine to back up the data onto an external single hard drive that we store offsite. To complicate matters, I play games on the Mac that are 32–bit and requires an optical drive as well as newer games on disc and from the App Store. I also play games from GoG and Steam. I would like to have a one system to do our production work and gaming but may consider using two systems that share a monitor using a kvm switch.

I am thinking of getting a used 2019 Mac Pro for $1000 with an external 2 or 4 RAID setup or getting a Mac Mini and using the 2012 Mac Pro in Target Disc Mode with a KVM switch.

I appreciate any advice on the direction I should go to upgrade.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Upgrading 2012 Mac Pro

Posted on Nov 19, 2025 10:10 AM

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Answer 1

padams35

Level 4

3,613 points

Nov 20, 2025 6:36 AM in response to Adrian Torres

The Late 2019 Mac Pro only supports Catalina and newer making it too new to run 32-bit Mac games natively.

If you want a single desktop system with both Mojave and a modern MacOS with security updates you will need either a Early 2019 iMac or a Late 2017 iMac Pro, but that leaves your graphic design business stuck on Sequoia and at risk of needing another system upgrade sooner rather than later.

I would suggest going with your second idea for getting a Mac Mini/Studio and toggling between it and the old 2012 with a KVM switch.

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Answer 2

Nov 20, 2025 8:16 AM in response to Adrian Torres

We were discussing Mac Pro 2013 capabilities here recently, and derived a factoid that has stuck with me.

The cheapest Apple-silicon MacBook Air outperforms the average Mac Pro 2103 desktop.

Punchline:

You can't go wrong upgrading to any Apple-silicon Mac, Except: 16 GB is the minimum acceptable RAM.

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Answer 3

Nov 20, 2025 2:15 PM in response to Adrian Torres

R in RAID is for redundant, but RAID is NOT backup!

• Mirrored RAID is used to reduce the time-to-repair after a failure, and to keep drive failures from becoming a data disaster. It does not protect from human error, crazy software, or 'just-because' failures.

• Striped RAID can be somewhat faster in some cases (especially in an array built from Rotating Magnetic drives), but it is brittle, and you MUST have another copy nearby in case of failure. A striped RAID failure destroys EVERYTHING on it, with No hope of recovery. Most users would be better served by a faster SSD than a striped rotating magnetic RAID.

• Concatenated RAID is not really RAID at all, it is "just a bunch of drives" aka JBOD, pasted together and acting as if it were one HUGE drive. So you can take two larger drives, concatenate them into one Volume, and have a really big Backup drive, for example.

• RAID 5 computes checksums of the data blocks (in real-time, coming and going), and stores two copies of the data AND the checksum blocks in such a way that a failure in any one of the three drives still allows the data to to be re-derived using data from the other two drives. It requires a checksum-computing Hardware-assist to be anywhere near fast enough for most uses.

Criticisms of RAID-5 include the cost and delays induced by the extra hardware, and the HUGE amount of time it takes to re-create a large data set using RAID-5. Re-creation time is so large, another drive is non-trivially likely to fail in the time it takes to re-create the data, making the entire concept shaky.

Executive summary: Most users would be better served using multiple drives to make multiple backups, rather than dedicating multiple drives to RAID arrays.

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Answer 4

Nov 20, 2025 11:44 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

All,

Thank you for your input. I have a 2024 MacBook Air that I use for web surfing but the storage is limited. My biggest concern is not to locked out if using Lightroom Classic CC which happened recently due to Adobe requiring High Sierra as a minimum OS to authenticate with their servers even though this is not officially documented and Adobe promised that no one will lose access to their photos. I can probably live with not using 32-bit gaming by using an older 2010 MacBook Pro that I have. Otherwise we use Photoshop CC about several times a year and Indesign and Dreamweaver one a year for a month. The most of the time the computer is primarily used for websites, email, MS Office, and gaming along with adding, organizing, and maintaining our professional photography and scans of fine artwork for reproduction.

I figure that I need to bite the bullet and get an external 2 or 4 drive external RAID to use with a Mac Mini or Studio to be rotated out every 5 years as a final state. I wish Apple is not dropping Intel emulation that will kill off more games soon, so my gaming will eventually stay on a vintage Intel MacBook Pro at some point.

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Answer 5

padams35

Level 4

3,613 points

Nov 20, 2025 2:28 PM in response to Adrian Torres

One thought since you already have the M3 Air.

Look for a used 2018 MBP for your legacy Intel needs. So much faster than a 2010.

Get a USB-C/Thunderbolt dock (USB-C if only using a single monitor, Thunderbolt if using dual monitors).

Connect mouse/keyboard/display(s) to the docking station and switch between Intel and Apple Silicon with one cable.

Also go ahead and bite the bullet on the external RAID enclosure (I'd suggest a 2 or 4 blade M.2 enclosure for performance instead of old 2.5/3.5" SATA). If the biggest problem with your Air is storage vs performance you might not even need a new Mini/Studio at this time.

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