Mac Pro
Apple has finally announced the new Mac Pro after allowing it to stagnate since 2013. Apple made a number of announcements about the product in early 2017. The business stated that Apple is revising its Mac Pro strategy and that a new modular model will be unveiled in the near future.
Phil Schiller acknowledged that the 2013 Mac Pro had not been well received by many pros, and it was this that had led to the radical rethink.
"With regards to the Mac Pro, we are in the process of what we call “completely rethinking the Mac Pro”. We’re working on it. We have a team working hard on it right now, and we want to architect it so that we can keep it fresh with regular improvements, and we’re committed to making it our highest-end, high-throughput desktop system, designed for our demanding pro customers.
As part of doing a new Mac Pro — it is, by definition, a modular system — we will be doing a pro display as well. Now you won’t see any of those products this year; we’re in the process of that. We think it’s really important to create something great for our pro customers who want a Mac Pro modular system, and that’ll take longer than this year to do.
In the interim, we know there are a number of customers who continue to buy our [current Mac Pros]. To be clear, our current Mac Pro has met the needs of some of our customers, and we know clearly not all of our customers. None of this is black and white, it’s a wide variety of customers. Some… it’s the kind of system they wanted; others, it was not.
In the meantime, we’re going to update the configs to make it faster and better for their dollar. This is not a new model, not a new design, we’re just going to update the configs. We’re doing that this week. We can give you the specifics on that.
The CPUs, we’re moving them down the line. The GPUs, down the line, to get more performance per dollar for customers who DO need to continue to buy them on the interim until we get to a newly architected system."
Apple gave the first look at its new Mac Pro at WWDC 2019. The new variant is a reintroduction of a prior generation's cheese grater design.
According to Apple, the new Mac Pro was built with easy access to its components in mind. All interior components mount to the frame with 360-degree components, and there are stainless steel handles for adaptability.
Mac Pro Specs
300 watts of power, runs fully unconstrained
2933MHz ECC memory, 12 DIMM slots
8 internal PCI slots, four double-wide slots, three single side slots
Half-length slot populated with two TB3 ports, audio jack, two USB A ports, two 10Gb Ethernet ports
Up to 1.5 terabytes of RAM
Intel Xeon processor with up to 28 cores
Apple designed a PCI connector with a second PCIe connector and power
Multiple graphics options; can configure with options such as Radeon Pro Vega II
Two GPUs connected via Infinity Fabric Link, 5X faster than PCI bust
Apple built a brand new card called Afterburner for video editing, 6 billion pixels per second. 3 streams of 8K, 12 streams of 4K
Mac Pro Pricing
The new Mac Pro starts at $5999 for 8-core, 32GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. If you include all of the upgrade options, it can reach a $50,000 price point.
Mac Pro Release Date
The Mac Pro was released in December of 2019.