Creatives with a love or need for the fastest computing equipment will want to get those wallets out, because Apple has granted a holiday wish, and it comes in the form of its special redesigned Mac Pro tower being ready to take home.
First announced in the middle of the year, the Mac Pro is a complete reinvention of Apple’s desktop powerhouse, a machine generally used by video editors, photographers, sound engineers, and anyone who requires a ton of power, as these aren’t your regular desktop machine, and they certainly aren’t an iMac.
Rather, the new Mac Pro is built with Intel’s high-end Xeon processors, capable of running up to 12 cores, and even capable of handling two workstation graphics chips from AMD. Parts like these tell us the Mac Pro will be better for processor intensive work than even the MacBook Pro Retina machines, and the top-end iMacs out there, with support for multiple 4K displays over the six Thunderbolt 2 ports offered, with 802.11ac WiFi, Gigabit Ethernet, and USB 3.0 ports, too.
The design is completely different than previous Mac Pro towers, which were aluminium boxes with lovely grill patterns, whereas the new one is cylindrical, and from the top has been compared with a cigarette ashtray.
We think it’s nice, though that’s open to interpretation, but the inside is very cool from a technical standpoint, with three boards lined up to form a triangular prism, and a giant heatsink in the middle cooling everything with a fan up top.
Overall, it’s a neat machine, and it’s now available in Australia, through either retail stores or the online presence, as well as some of the authorised Apple resellers.
In Australia, the Mac Pro will start at $3999 and some with a 3.7GHz quad-core Intel Xeon,12GB RAM, dual AMD FirePro D300 graphics chips with 2GB RAM on each, and 256GB solid-state storage, while a second model will push the chip up to a six-core Xeon, better graphics (D500 with 3GB), and 16GB storage for $5299.
If you need the best of the best, more processing power can be added, even faster graphics, more memory, and up to 1TB of solid-state storage, and if you head this way, expect the price to blow out past anything you’d normally find at your local electronics store.
Regardless, the new Mac Pros should be in stores shortly, while the web store should let you order shortly (at the time of publishing, the web system wasn’t letting you order or configure Mac Pros at the Australian Apple site).
