Apple’s new Mac Pro – the same one that was first showcased back at WWDC 2013 in June (yet never shipped) – will be made available in December starting at $2,999.
Unlike other consumer-oriented gadgets such as the iPhone, iPad and iPod, the current Mac Pro has retained the same aesthetics since Steve Jobs unveiled the PowerMac G5 a decade ago. The 2003 version shipped with an 80GB hard drive and just 256MB of RAM and while the line has seen upgrades over the years, it hasn’t received a significant upgrade since 2010.
The entry-level Mac Pro ships with an Intel Xeon E5 quad-core processor clocked at 3.7GHz (Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz), 12GB of ECC RAM, two AMD FirePro D300 graphics cards each with 2GB of VRAM and a 256GB solid state drive.
If that’s not enough power for you, the machine can be configured with up to a 12-core processor clocked at 2.7GHz, 64GB of ECC RAM, 1TB of flash storage and dual AMD FirePro D700 cards with 6GB of VRAM apiece. Exact pricing for upgraded configurations has not yet been announced but given that sort of hardware, don’t expect it to be cheap.
The new Mac Pro is being built in the United States, supports up to three 4K displays or six Thunderbolt monitors and feature 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0, four USB 3.0 ports, six Thunderbolt ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI 1.4 UltraHD. What’s more, they will ship with OS X Mavericks pre-installed.
