Apple's new Mac Pro is pretty unique on its own, but Jony Ive recently created a special version of the new desktop machine for a Project Red charity auction. Unveiled in late October, the red Mac Pro was expected to go for around $60,000. In fact, that figure was at the top end of Sotheby's $40,000 - $60,000 estimate. This past weekend, the computer was sold for well over 10 times that amount.
In a press release sent out on Saturday night, Sotheby's revealed that a massive $26 million had been raised for The Global Fund thanks to The (RED) Auction. The collection of items for auction was curated by Ive and Marc Newson in collaboration with Bono. Sotheby's website lists the lot sold price for the red Mac Pro as $977,000, though it didn't fetch the highest price of the night. Also up for auction were a Leica Digital Rangefinder Camera designed by Ive and an aluminum desk produced by Neal Feay Studio and designed by Newson. Both items fetched in excess of $1.5 million.
Announced back in June, Apple's new Mac Pro will ship in December. 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 1866 MHz 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.
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