After three years without a substantial update and several months of teasing and promoting, Apple has finally announced that tomorrow it will begin selling the newly designed and more powerful Mac Pro it first showed off at WWDC back in June. (Full press release below.)
The road was certainly not rapid between update cycles with two years of nary a word on whether or not the Mac Pro line had any life left in it and a full year of teasing and promoting the 2013 model being released tomorrow. Let’s take a look at the Mac Pro saga that led to today’s debut…
We have begun manufacturing the Mac Pro in Austin. It’s the most powerful Mac ever. Orders start tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/Jrd1Gic3Ya
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) December 18, 2013
Tim Cook offered the first tease of the Mac Pro way back in December 2012 during an appearance on NBC’s now-cancelled Rock Center with Brian Williams. Apple’s CEO described the company’s investment in bringing production of what we would later learn to be the new Mac Pro into the United States:
Months later in May, Mr. Cook described the unreleased American-assembled Mac line during an unrelated Senate hearing as being built in Texas with components and equipment sourced from Illinois, Florida, Kentucky, and Michigan.
It was June 10th during WWDC that Apple surprised us all with its theatric reveal of the professional desktop line with a Hollywood-style trailer showcasing the 2013 Mac Pro.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQl2FjaKCAQ]
SVP of Marketing Phil Schiller revealed the all new design of the Mac Pro as well as other details like 4K display support and Thunderbolt 2. Schiller famously followed up the trailer presentation by teasingly saying “Apple can’t innovate, my ass.” What Schiller did not express at the time was pricing and availability short of later this year.
Fast forward to October 22 during Apple’s Fall Event for the iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display. Here the company revealed the professional desktop’s $2,999 and $3,999 price tag for quad-core and 6-core base models, respectively. However, the company did not reveal the 2013 Mac Pro launch date, opting instead to simply commit to a vague December launch.
Apple also continued the marketing campaign for the unreleased computer offering a highly produced video look at the Mac Pro assembly process.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbWOQWw1wkM]
A Jony Ive and Marc Newson designed (PRODUCT)RED 2013 Mac Pro was listed and sold at auction for $977,000 between October and November (and once believed to be purchased by Tony, Fadell, former head of Apple’s iPod division and Nest founder and CEO).
Interestingly, select journalists began receiving marketing posters for the highly anticipated Mac Pro around the same time showing Apple’s continuos effort in drumming up interest and anticipation for the next-generation Macintosh.
Now the real excitement unfolds with the all new Mac Pro shipping to the handful of Mac fans and professionals lucky enough to pick one up.
Our own Jordan Kahn interviewed extreme sports photographer Luca Gilman (pictured above) who was included in among select few professionals Apple chose to test drive the 2013 Mac Pro ahead of its December debut.
Expect more great stories like Gilman’s to come as the brand new Mac Pro finally enters the market for the first tomorrow.
CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Apple® today announced the all-new Mac Pro® will be available to order starting Thursday, December 19. Redesigned from the inside out, the all-new Mac Pro features the latest Intel Xeon processors, dual workstation-class GPUs, PCIe-based flash storage and ultra-fast ECC memory.
Designed around an innovative unified thermal core, the all-new Mac Pro packs unprecedented performance into an aluminum enclosure that is just 9.9-inches tall and one-eighth the volume of the previous generation. Mac Pro features 4-core, 6-core, 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon processors running at Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz and two workstation-class AMD FirePro GPUs that deliver up to eight times the graphics performance of the previous generation Mac Pro.* PCIe-based flash storage delivers sequential read speeds up to 10 times faster than conventional desktop hard drives, and ECC DDR3 gives the new Mac Pro up to 60GBps of memory bandwidth for seamlessly editing full-resolution 4K video while simultaneously rendering effects in the background. With an incredible six Thunderbolt 2 ports, each with up to 20Gbps of bandwidth per device, the new Mac Pro completely redefines desktop expandability with support for up to 36 high-performance peripherals, including the latest 4K displays.
Pricing & Availability
The Mac Pro is available with a 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 starting at $2,999 (US); and with a 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 starting at $3,999 (US). Configure-to-order options include faster 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon E5 processors, AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of VRAM, up to 64GB of memory, and up to 1TB of PCIe-based flash storage. Additional technical specifications, configure-to-order options and accessories are available online at www.apple.com/mac-pro.
The all-new Mac Pro will be available to order starting Thursday, December 19 through the Apple Online Store (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers.
*Testing conducted by Apple in October 2013 using preproduction Mac Pro 12-core 2.7 GHz units with 1TB flash storage and AMD FirePro D700 graphics, and shipping Mac Pro 12-core 3.06 GHz units with 512GB SSD and ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics.
Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.
