Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro Tower Now Available: From $5,999 to $53,000
by Anton Shilov on December 10, 2019 3:15 PM EST- Posted in
- Workstation
- Displays
- Apple
- Mac Pro
- Monitors
- Desktop
- Pro Display XDR
Apple on Tuesday started sales of its revamped Mac Pro workstation. The new Mac Pro brings Apple back to the forefront of expensive, high-performance workstations for the first time in years. The company also began sales of its new Pro Display XDR, the company’s first high-end monitor in a long time.
The Apple Mac Pro workstation are powered by Intel’s Xeon W processors, with options ranging from eight to 28 cores. Memory options similarly span a wide range, all the way from 32 GB to 1.5 TB of DDR4-2933 memory. Meanwhile the machine's storage, which all solid-state and backed by Apple's T2 controller, is available today from 256 GB to 4 TB, and Apple has already announced that an 8TB option is coming soon.
As for the graphics side of things, the Mac Pro starts with AMD's Radeon Pro 580X. Upgrade options include the newer Radeon Pro W5700X – roughly equivalent to AMD’s recently launched Radeon Pro W5700 – and the top option is up to two AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo graphics cards in MPX form-factor. The latter offers a total of 16384 stream processors (4096 SPs per GPU), 128 GB of HBM2 memory (32 GB per GPU), and eight display outputs.
Since the Mac Pro machine is aimed at professionals from the movie and adjacent industries, they can be equipped with Apple’s Afterburner FPGA-based accelerator card. All told, the workstation has multiple PCIe 3.0 slots and a 1.4 kW PSU, so the new Mac Pro can be expanded quite significantly.
The base price of Apple’s new Mac Pro tower with an eight-core CPU is $5,999, but a system with maxed out specifications is priced at a whopping $53,247.98.
In addition to the new workstation, Apple also started to sell its exclusive 32-inch Pro Display XDR monitor. The (ed: breathtaking) display uses a 10-bit IPS panel and offers a 6016×3384 resolution, 1,000 nits – 1,600 nits brightness (sustained/peak), and a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio because of Mini-LED backlighting. The standard model of the display costs $4,999, but an anti-reflective version with nano-texture glass carries a $5,999 MSRP. Infamously, the monitor doesn't come with a stand or VESA mount adapter, and these have to be purchased separately for $999 and $199, respectively.
Related Reading:
- Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR Will Be Available in December
- The Apple WWDC 2019 Keynote Live Blog (Starts at 10am PT/17:00 UTC)
- Apple to Redesign Mac Pro, Comments That GPU Cooling Was A Roadblock
- LG Unveils New UltraFine 4K & 5K Monitors: Now with iPad Pro Support
Sources: Apple
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
81 Comments
View All Comments
Kevin G - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
The other difference is the Apple uses the M suffix Xeons for the 28 core model where as the HP can be configured without. That's several thousand dollars just to enable greater than 1 TB memory capacity. Thanks Intel for your artificial product segmentation.Samus - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
It really is nut scratching that Apple wouldn't partner with AMD for CPU's when they have clearly superior chipsets, CPU microarchitecture and scalability...AND they already use them exclusively for GPU support - because there is no longer any driver development for nVidia GPU's under Catalina.goatfajitas - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
$6000 for an 8 core Intel CPU, 32gb RAM, Radeon 580 and and a 256gb SSD? OMG, this is ridiculous even for Apple. Seriously WTF?cosmotic - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
Agreed; this system was out of date when it was announced a year ago. Then AMD pounced. This system is positively old and it's not even shipping yet.cosmotic - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
And it costs a bajillion dollars.Alistair - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
Apple: The only company that will sell you Intel CPUs for the original price before Intel cut them in half last month. $300 per core.danielfranklin - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
I havent seen anything about price drops on the W-3200 platform, only the W-2200.Come to think of it, i havent actually seen any W-2200 chips even for sale....
danielfranklin - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
Out of date? Its using the newer socket'd Xeon W based on Intel Xeon Scalable 2nd gen. I havent seen many if any machines based on this platform yet.It cost a lot yes, but so would any machine running this platform, then Apple does they mega markup and we are there.
smilingcrow - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
People are probably referencing AMD so the implication is that the performance is out of date rather than the shelf life.The irony here is that Apple chose AMD for the GPUs where they are second best and Intel for the CPUs where AMD are now top dog.
A rookie mistake, as if they sent an intern to the shop to buy the parts and they got confused, bought the wrong ones and spent too much on the bling for the case.
Imagine a Bentley with a diesel engine that thinks it's a Maserati.
Llawehtdliub - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
Keep up, Dan. AMD threadrippee already kicks it's ass for half the price.. Come 2020 Q2 it will be significantly outdated. Pcie 3? Laughs all around!