The new iPads and iPad minis may have been the star of the show at yesterday’s Apple’s event, but the new Mac Pro also caused a bit of excitement, and, in the case of the Australian pricing, some disappointment.
The Mac Pro is a desktop computer, but it’s not like the beige towers of old, as you can see in the video above, showing the Mac Pro being constructed in a California factory.
“The new Mac Pro is our vision for the future of the pro desktop, everything about it has been reimagined and there has never been anything like it,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “The new Mac Pro packs up to 12-core Xeon CPUs, dual FirePro GPUs, ultra-fast ECC memory, new PCIe flash storage, Thunderbolt 2 expandability and more into a radical new design that is one-eighth the size of the previous generation Mac Pro.”
The new Mac Pro will be in Australian stores in December, with pricing details as follows:
- 3.7 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of VRAM each, 12GB of memory, and 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage – pricing starts at $3,999 RRP.
- 3.5 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3GB of VRAM each, 16GB of memory, and 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage – pricing starts at $5,299 RRP.
I mentioned above that the Australian pricing had caused some comment, and murmurs of this being another example of us having to pay an ‘Australia tax’ – in the US those two configurations of the Mac Pro are selling for US$2,999 and US$3,999 respectively.