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
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goatfajitas - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
That is kind of everyone's point. Other more powerful "WORK" computers are 1/3 the price and could remain in use for longer.cnxsoft - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
$200 for a VESA mount adapter... It must be a really good one.Llawehtdliub - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
Tim Cook is an absolute brainlet. $400 for wheels where you could get some at home depot for $20 that would work just as well.The hardware in this mac pro is already beaten and outdated by threadripper 3970x for half the price.
Apple stock is going to take a hit in 2020 for sure. Sell sell sell...
goatfajitas - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
Apples cash cow is mobile devices. This workstation wont hurt them if it doesn't sell. The dull masses will still buy their other products.M O B - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
When can we see a review? Curious what is user-upgradeable as well as to see details on the thermals.Xyler94 - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
I see a lot of people are delusional about this product.Let me put one thing clear before I start this maybe-rant. I do not like the pricing, but Apple is hardly the only ones who do it in this market. The market of professional equipment. Everything is priced higher because they can afford it. These machines will be used to make millions, sometimes billions.
That out of the way, let us discuss a few things:
Why didn't Apple use AMD processors?
Well, that's probably the easiest answer. When they decided to engineer this thing, AMD's Zen2 Arch was not anywhere close to being done, heck I don't even know if Zen was released yet. Gotta remember, these things don't come to market 30 days after engineering. Intel probably also gave Apple a great deal on the Xeons. And maybe the Xeons have features Apple wanted, like AVX-512/VNNI support.
Why did Apple use AMD GPUs if they didn't use their CPUs?
Isn't that the wonders of PCIe? being able to use an Intel CPU with AMD GPUs? Also, these aren't just "Rx580s", they are customized for Apple. And Apple will not use NVidia GPUs due to a long standing feud between the two companies.
Why's it so expensive?
Because you aren't the target market, and yes, I realize some in the target market would also say it's expensive... but welcome to enterprise equipment. Where prices are made up, and companies buy it anyways, because it will help them make a boat load of money. At 50K, if this thing can help animators make a movie in 10% less time, you bet your ass they will be sold immediately.
It's the pro scene that is messed up with pricing. But if people are willing to buy it, why not price it high? At the end of the day, if it helps you make millions, what's 50k?
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
"At 50K, if this thing can help animators make a movie in 10% less time"only if no other machine on the planet can do that relative to some specific 'standard machine'.
solipsism - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
I agree with you that prices are made up… but that's because all prices are made up. Apple clearly wants to make a profit here, but it's a different market compared to any other device segment for them. When you consider the much lower volume over other Mac types and overhead for building in the US I doubt that their profit margin is any higher, and could very well be lower because of the higher average price tag per unit and because they can use it as a marketing tool. Everything I've seen with equatable PCs and displays from a full service vendor shows that it's competitively priced.M O B - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
Fair enough that Apple simply isn't nimble enough to design a product in response to AMD crushing it.However, Apple's modifications to GPUs traditionally hasn't been very positive. They seem to just make them slightly different so that they can give them a new model number and it is less obvious that they are selling you an RX 580 for $500.
Apple is responsible for their feud with Nvidia. Did Nvidia's 8600GT cause problems 10 years ago? Absolutely. Does Nvidia have the best products on the GPU market right now? Absolutely. Could Apple have let the consumer choose either AMD or Nvidia? You know the drill. That's all on Apple.
And no, they are over-priced. The target market can pay $25k and get 128-cores of AMD EPYC and completely crush the MacPro, but not by 10%, but by 300%. No studio worth their salt is going with a MacPro over that unless they absolutely cannot move away from MacOS, in which case they need to set up a damn cluster and keep the front end iMac's or iMacPros (which is how quite a few studios are already set up, by the way).
The pro scene isn't the problem. The problem here is Apple, and every company will pay less money for more performance. This Mac Pro is going to be a flop, just like the last one, but what does Apple care since they are a software & services company moonlighting as a iPhone company these days. A look at this Mac Pro shows they clearly don't care.
lilkwarrior - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
Apple's pro ecosystem is compromised without Nvidia RTX serie… or at least getting AMD to hurry the heck up with their equivalents to Tensor cores & ray-tracing cores + a more competent alt to CUDA.