Apple unveils the new Mac Pro

At Apple’s October 22nd press event, the company unveiled a number of new and updated products including a smaller iPad, iPad mini with retina display, and its latest version of OS X, Mavericks. But for the pro audio community, the biggest announcement by far was the reveal of details surrounding the (until now) mysterious new Mac Pro. 

“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.” 

Apple seems to clearly be targeting the audio and recording industry with its latest flagship desktop as one of the first people to be given a unit to test was music producer Stuart Price (Lady GaGa, Madonna, The Killers) who commented: "The new Mac Pro is blazing fast and shockingly quiet. You have to not hear it to believe it. This is the perfect computer for the recording studio."

The all-new Mac Pro is architected around a unified thermal core that allows the system to efficiently share thermal capacity across all the processors. An innovative fan draws in air incredibly efficiently and makes the new Mac Pro as quiet as a Mac mini.

It features 4-core, 6-core, 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon processors running at turbo boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz; six Thunderbolt 2 ports, each with up to 20Gbps of bandwidth per device; PCIe-based flash storage that delivers sequential read speeds up to 1.2GBps and is up to 10 times faster than conventional desktop hard drives; ECC DDR3 running at 1866 MHz, with a four-channel memory controller giving the new Mac Pro up to 60GBps of memory bandwidth, twice that of the previous generation Mac Pro; and ships with the new OS X Mavericks.

The new Mac Pro is scheduled to ship in December through Apple’s online store with a base price of £2,499 inc VAT.

www.Apple.co.uk