There is no doubt that, in terms of hardware, the major launch of WWDC 2013 was the ninth Mac Pro. And it’s worth noting that it wasn’t really a launch, but what Apple called Sneak peek It is a kind of preliminary presentation of the machine, which should reach the market later this year.
Although we have talked about it in this article, it is good to take a new general step by the new “tower” and go into some of its details.
The new Mac Pro promises to do with professional desktops what the MacBook Air did with consumer laptops: to promote a new trend, a new direction. The cylindrical design (or tube, as you prefer) with 25cm high and 17cm in a beautiful diameter, but just as they called the old one "cheese grater", you can already see in this new one a "futuristic ashtray". Although the format is totally different, something about it also reminds me of the glorious Power Mac G4 Cube.
It is also the first Mac in years to evade the aluminum look of the entire current line, bringing back a shiny black surface (glossy), commonly called "Black piano". Believe it or not: the cylinder has 1/8 of the total volume of the Mac Pro that we knew until yesterday.
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Still looking outside, see in the image above and right the infinity of connections that Apple built into: digital audio input and output, four USB 3.0 ports, six Thunderbolt 2 ports (20Gbps), two Gigabit Ethernet ports and an HDMI 1.4 output .
Inside, the new Mac Pro is rude: Intel Xeon E5 processors with 12 cores, two AMD FirePro GPUs workstation-class (with up to 6GB of dedicated VRAM), PCI Express-based flash storage and ECC DDR3 memories running at 1,866MHz four channels (with up to 60GB / s of bandwidth), giving you 7 teraflops computing power. It is up to 2.5x faster than the current Mac Pro, according to Apple, and supports up to three simultaneous monitors with 4K resolution. The expected Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 wireless connectivity is also there, of course.
The design of this new Mac Pro is built around a unified thermal core, which allows the desktop to efficiently share all its thermal capacity across all processors. As announced a while ago, it will also be assembled on American territory.
One unit was put on display at the Moscone Center and staff at the Engadget recorded a video commenting on the main news:
Here are some pictures:
Hardly * everyone * will approve the new design, but it was time for a complete remodel. Without going into details, the previous look came from before Apple migrated to Intel processors and was introduced in the Power Macs G5, originally released in June 2003. Yes, a decade ago.
Apple has not yet announced all the models that will hit the market and neither their prices, but whoever wants to know a little more about this machine * should * visit the hotsite created by the company. a show of beauty and animations in HTML5 / CSS3, really drooling.
