Apple's New Mac Pro to Ship in December at $2,999

News
By Jane McEntegart
published

Apple's cylindrical desktop now has a price and a release timeframe.

Back in June, Apple offered us a quick look at a new breed of Mac Pro. Though the company was more than happy to talk about the computer's innovative design, we didn't get a whole lot of information regarding the guts of the machine. At its event today, Apple went into a lot more detail about what's under the hood on the new Mac Pro.

 

Assembled in the United States, the Mac Pro features a 3.7 GHz quad-core Xeon from Intel. This is working alongside two AMD FirePro D300 GPUs, 12 GB of 1866MHz DDR3 RAM, 256 GB of PCIe flash storage (read/write speeds of 1.2 GBps/1 GBps) and up to six Thunderbolt 2 ports. Customers can configure their Mac Pro with as much as 64 GB of RAM and 1 TB of flash storage, so while pricing starts at $2,999, you can expect that baseline price to rise if you make changes to the specs.

Read all about the Mac Pros CPU: Intel's 12-Core Xeon With 30 MB Of L3

 

The Mac Pro's glossy, cylindrical design is drastically different than anything Apple has done before. Apple's marketing chief Phillip Schiller called the center of the Mac Pro's design a "thermal core" back in June. The cooling solution is certainly innovative, featuring a center piece made of a three-sided heatsink, with each side cooling the entire length of each PCB. A single large fan pulls the hot air up and out.

Apple is promising a December ship date, though the company didn't specify whether the Mac Pro would enjoy a global rollout.

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Jane McEntegart
25 Comments Comment from the forums
  • fyend
    Mac Pro brought to you by Dyson.
    Reply
  • therogerwilco
    The components add up to about 1000-1200$. Fools and their money will soon be parted.
    Reply
  • wolley74
    can anybody find anything on the GPUs in it? i cannot find a single thing called AMD FirePro D300 anywhere on any website
    Reply
  • realibrad
    11771707 said:
    The components add up to about 1000-1200$. Fools and their money will soon be parted.

    I hear there are people who pay for large black things. I have even seen vids of women enjoying them.

    You may not want to pay a premium of $1,000 but its a cylinder, so it totally could go for more.

    Cylinders, they are the new cubes...
    Reply
  • santiagoanders
    The D300 is about equivalent to a FirePro W7000 (given the number of shaders, compute power, and memory bandwidth). But it looks like they skimped on VRAM - the FirePro W7000 has 4GB per card, not 2GB.
    Reply
  • ap3x
    "The components add up to about 1000-1200$. Fools and their money will soon be parted."

    Please explain your math? Using the exact same parts. Xeons and everything, next tell me how much it cost to support this $1200 machine for one year, keep in mind that you also need to include the cost of software and lastly, find a workstation class board that has 6 thunderbolt 2 ports on it and provide that as well.

    I think you will find that what you just mentioned does not exist and a comparable machine from another manufacturer costs fairly close to this machine if not more.

    Also, Workstation class machine, not a gaming machine. The differences is productivity + making money vs wasting time + loosing money.
    Reply
  • cmi86
    Looks the trash can in my office lol. Can I play basketball with this too?
    Reply
  • g-unit1111
    11771674 said:
    Mac Pro brought to you by Dyson.

    It does look like a vacuum cleaner doesn't it? :lol:
    Reply
  • del35
    Waooo, Apple is soooooooooo innovative! Surely morons will be lining up to buy the piece of crap.
    Reply
  • colson79
    11771707 said:
    The components add up to about 1000-1200$. Fools and their money will soon be parted.

    The 2 CPU's and GPU's alone cost over $1200.
    Reply