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
81 Comments
View All Comments
krazyfrog - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
Yes it can and you should get yours checked if it doesn't.AdditionalPylons - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
If you can't then you're not in the market anyway.Spunjji - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
One is suitable for working on HDR content - the other is literally incapable of properly displaying it. Whether or not you think your eye can or cannot tell, these are just facts.808Hilo - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
Yep, not a proof monitor and the Dell is 2k better. Color Gamut and Gamma is wrong on Apple stuff anyways and no 3d LUT. The Pro comes with one old or two old AMD Cards. No Nvidia drivers. Much less software than on Win. AMD is running circles around Intels 2 generations old chip. The upgrade path is 6 years or more no can do hardware like that.WaltC - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
Incredible. Only from Apple, where less is always more, and costs a whole lot more, too...;) I wonder how many Apple-ites will be buying those $1k monitor stands?...! Only from Apple. I wonder...does the Pro come standard with the same measly 12-month warranty Apple puts on most everything else it sells--last I checked? (You have to pay for a longer warranty.)hescominsoon - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
build a Threadripper system for less than half as much that will run circles around the xeons and won't need the proprietary pci-e daughter board as well.goatfajitas - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
Threadripper? I just Built a better speced Intel based Thinkstation P520c at Lenovo.com for $2500. Now that isnt as nice of a case (opinion) but that case is worth $3500 only if the wheels are worth $400. Oh wait. Apple charges $400 to upgrade the legs to wheels. LOLsmilingcrow - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
Around a third of the price depending on the spec but with a much faster CPU and PCIe 4.0 storage.Apple's margins are amazing so maybe that bite out the Apple relates to the relative cost to them with the rest the profit margin! :)
FunBunny2 - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
"Apple's margins are amazing"Barnum was right.
eek2121 - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
You can buil an 128 core EPYC based server for around half the cost. I don't criticize Apple's pricing much, but damn.