Mission accomplished. Say hello to the new Mac Pro, Apple’s new high performance desktop workstation. The Mac Pro is designed with today’s high end professional in mind, completely equipped to handle the heaviest computing tasks: 3D rendering, professional video/audio editing, scientific computing and more.
At the heart of every Mac Pro are two Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors. This gives each Mac Pro four processor cores, allowing it to process the most intensive applications with lightning fast speed. Not only are these new processors faster, they’re also cooler and more efficient than the Mac Pro’s G5 predecessor. As a result of the cooler temps, each case requires far fewer fans than the G5, which translates into more space inside to pack features.
Apple fills that free space with expansion options galore, including: 8 DIMM slots that support up to 16GB of RAM, up to 2TB of drive storage, room for two full size optical drives, four PCI Express slots, five USB 2.0 ports, and four firewire ports. Each enclosure comes with four storage bays, each able to hold a 500GB SATA drive. Adding or swapping those drives out is a snap too - simply slide out the bay, screw in the new hard drive, and slide the bay back in. You don’t have to mess with any of the cables either, each bay comes already powered and wired to the motherboard!
From a price standpoint, the new Mac Pro comes with a sticker of around $2,500. Surprisingly though, the days of Mac’s being more expensive than PC’s are over thanks to the new Intel processors. It’s not exactly comparing apples to apples (no pun intended), but a similarly equipped Dell is about $1,000 more than the Mac Pro! Yeah, you read that right.
So now your thinking, “Sounds good so far, but are there any cons?”. Not many actually. The biggest shortcomings of the Mac Pro have nothing to do with hardware at all. Most Mac software available today isn’t designed for the new four processor cores and therefore can’t reap the processing gains yet. Plus, a lot of Mac software out there isn’t written for the new Intel chips and as a result some things don’t operate as fast as they could because PowerPC commands have to be translated to Intel ones. But the hardware had to get there first before the software, so you can bet the farm that software developers will catch up quickly!
While your average computer user probably doesn’t need this much power, your high end professionals will find the Mac Pro hard to pass up. Powerful, efficient, easy to upgrade, and you can run Windows on it. We think Apple has a winner here!
For more details, check out these pictures and this QuickTime about the Mac Pro’s hardware configuration.
