Apple Confirms ‘Radical’ Mac Pro Will Get December Release

Apple has confirmed that the new Mac Pro will be released in December, with prices for the “most radical Mac ever” starting from £2,499.

The Mac Pro is described as a ‘re-imagination of the desktop’ and is built around a unified thermal core that shares thermal capacity across all of its processors, with a fan that draws in air making it as quiet as a Mac Mini.

“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.

Apple Mac Pro

The system stands at just 9.9 inches tall, an eighth of the volume of the previous generation Mac Pros, and features the latest Intel Xeon processors with up to 12 cores running at Turbo Boost speeds of up to 3.9 GHz, coupled with two workstation-class AMD FirePro GPUs with up to 12GB of video memory.

PCIe flash storage delivers sequential read speeds of up to 1.2Gbps and is ten times faster than conventional hard drives, while ultra-fast ECC memory provides up to 60GBps of memory bandwidth.

Apple says the new Mac Pro will give significant enhancements to its professional applications, including Final Cut Pro X, Logic Pro X and Aperture. Final Cut Pro X makes use of the dual GPUs for better real-time playback and rendering, while the six Thunderbolt 2 ports allow for faster exporting.

It ships with the recently announced OS X Mavericks, which adds more than 200 new features, including finder tabs, tags, enhanced multi-display support, compressed memory and significant performance enhancements for systems with Dual GPUs.

Prices range from £2,499 to £3,299 for the standard models, a figure which can be increased by the addition of various memory and storage upgrades.

The Mac Pro will compete against rival workstations from the likes of HP, which updated its desktop systems in September, and Dell, which says its new super-powered Precision M3800 can be an Apple killer.

Apple has also announced a new range of thinner, faster MacBook Pros and the refreshed iPad Air and iPad Mini with retina display.

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