Apple announces the new Mac Pro, focusing on power and expansion

Apple hasn"t produced a meaningful refresh of its Mac Pro since it introduced the "trash can design". It wasn"t well received, and the company admitted its mistakes two years ago, saying it would do better.

Today is the day, as Apple unveiled its new Mac Pro. It"s completely redesigned, looking more like the "cheese grater" model than the 2013 one. It"s made out of stainless steel, and has stainless steel handles so it"s easy to carry around. The two big focuses that the firm talked about were power and expandability.

The new Mac Pro heralds the return of PCIe slots, as there are eight of them. They support standard PCIe, but Apple said that it added its own component to it to add Thunderbolt 3 to the lanes.

The company also showed off the Mac Pro Expansion Module, or MPX Module for short. It can include up to an AMD Radeon Vega II GPU, which includes 32GB HBM2. Moreover, you can use two MPX Modules for up to 28 Tflops performance. It also comes with up to a 28-core Intel Xeon processor.

It has six 2933MHz memory channels with 12 DIMM slots, and that means it supports up to 1.5TB of memory. Naturally, this requires a lot of power with a 1.4kW power supply, and this machine has three fans, although Apple says that under normal workloads, it won"t be any louder than an iMac Pro.

The new Mac Pro starts at $5,999, and it ships this fall. That model comes with an eight-core Xeon, 32GB RAM, Radeon Pro 580X, and a 256GB SSD. The firm also pointed out that a PC specced similarly to the base model would cost well over $8,000.

To go with it, Apple is introducing the Pro Display XDR, a 32-inch 6K Retina display with 6016x3384 resolution. Moreover, you can use up to six of them with the new Mac Pro. It has P3 and 10-bit color, and a million to one contrast ratio.

The Pro Display XDR will start at $4,999, and there are other accessories like a VESA mount for $199.