The Foundry Secretly Tested the Mac Pro for Weeks in Apple's 'Evil Lab'

Apple let The Foundry secretly test the new Mac Pro for weeks but it was enclosed in a giant filing cabinet, reports AppleInsider.

The company recently announced that it will be bringing its 3D painting tool MARI, which was used in "Avatar" and "The Avengers", to the Mac. The software was shown running on the Mac Pro to demo how Pixar was using it for "Monsters University."

The Foundry's team worked on the new Mac Pro in a room at Apple's Headquarters known as the "Evil Lab".


"We were essentially doing a blind tasting of the machine," said Jack Greasley, MARI product manager at The Foundry. "All we could see was the monitor, and the Mac Pro was encased in a giant metal filing cabinet on wheels. Experiencing the machine in this way was actually really cool, because I can tell you that the speed and power of this machine really stands up. Mari running on this machine out of the box is the fastest I have ever seen it run."

Greasley spent a few weeks in the Evil Lab" alongside Jonathan Hoffman, a texturing and shading artist from Pixar. MARI was given an hour long session at WWDC for developers to check out the software and the new system.

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