14 DAY TRIAL // After an hour’s worth of maintenance, Apple has updated its online store with the availability of new Mac Pros, as promised late last month when the company unveiled the beefed up workstations. Starting at $2,499, the towers come in Quad-Core, 8-Core, and 12-Core configurations, with 1TB hard drives, and the option to order a 512GB SSD (solid state drive) - a first for the Mac Pro line. The systems ship in 7 to 10 business days, according to the listings at store.apple.com.
On July 27, 2010, Apple officially unveiled its new Mac Pro line with up to 12 processing cores and up to 50 percent greater performance than the previous generation. “Featuring the latest quad-core and 6-core Intel Xeon processors, all-new ATI graphics and the option for up to four 512GB solid state drives (SSD), the new Mac Pro continues to deliver amazing performance and expandability for the most demanding consumers and professionals,” the announcement reads over at Apple’s PR section.
Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Philip Schiller, is quoted in the report as saying, “The new Mac Pro is the most powerful and configurable Mac we’ve ever made. With up to 12 cores, the new Mac Pro outperforms our previous top-of-the-line system by up to 50 percent, and with over a billion possible configurations, our customers can create exactly the system they want.”
Towards the end of its July 27 report, Apple outlined that “The new Mac Pro will be available in August through the Apple Store (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers.” The company did not specify the exact day, and continued with listing the available configurations, starting with the base $2,499 Mac Pro which boasts the following specs:
- one 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon W3530 processor with 8MB of fully-shared L3 cache; - 3GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM memory, expandable up to 16GB; - ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB of GDDR5 memory; - two Mini DisplayPorts and one DVI (dual-link) port (adapters sold separately); - 1TB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm; - 18x SuperDrive® with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW); - four PCI Express 2.0 slots; - five USB 2.0 ports and four FireWire® 800 ports; - AirPort Extreme® 802.11n; - Bluetooth 2.1+EDR; and - Apple Keyboard with numerical keypad and Magic Mouse.
Configure-to-order options include one 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon W3565 processor for the quad-core Mac Pro, one 3.33 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon W3680 processor for quad-core configurations, two 2.66 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 processors (12-cores) for the 8-core version, and two 2.93 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon X5670 processors (12-cores) for the model featuring the 8-core CPU. On the graphics front, the new Mac Pros can be equipped with two ATI Radeon HD 5770 cards with 1GB of GDDR5 memory, or one ATI Radeon HD 5870 card with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. RAM is also expandable to up to 32GB of DDR3 ECC SDRAM memory for the 8-core Mac Pro, while all models support up to four 1TB or 2TB Serial ATA hard drives running at 7200 rpm, dual-channel or quad-channel 4Gb Fibre Channel cards, and two 18x SuperDrives with double-layer support.
Visit Apple here to learn more about the new Mac Pro line.