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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Kevin G - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
You do realize that the DGX Station from nVidia is even more expensive than the Mac Pro right? It is the only other system that can offer quad GPU with links (other vendors are limited to two cards with nvLink).LordConrad - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
Apple... for tech yuppies with more money than sense. Ignore the outdated internals, we have the flashy aluminum case!lukewayne - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
Anton, very interested to know how/if the XDR Display can be used with a PClilkwarrior - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
The XDR Display will work w/ PCs just fine. It just uses Thunderbolt 3 which modern PCs & laptops accommodate.MrEcho - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
The people who are going to be buying the top end models make that much money in one contract or a few. And that computer will make them 20-100x the cost of of it. You have to think of the long term money they will make using a computer like that.This is a WORK computer, and is going to be used for the next 5-10 years. $50K is nothing compared to what they will make with this machine.
Llawehtdliub - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
False.My company does video editing for internal and client jobs. We are about a 500 person agency. There's no way we'd pay this kind of money for a video editing station. 10k would have been acceptable which would allow us 3 - 4 full time video editors. The price to performance and longevity of this machine is not worth it when we see threadripper CPU and nvidia GPU already outperforming the top specs on this mac pro.
In 1-2 years time this machine will be slow compared to whata coming. There's no way an even strippes down version is worth it.
If Apple came out and said... "We will sell you new motherboards or cpu in the future that will work with this mac pro" then MAYBE we'd consider it... But knowing Apple that is unlikely.
We'll be switching to linux or windows video editing stations.
Kevin G - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
Look into putting Apple's Afterburner FPGA card into an external chassis. I have a feeling for editors leveraging ProRes day in, day out, that that'll be the major performance booster. An iMac Pro with that card should be significantly less with similar performance with that card.Boland - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
what software are you using? You said you may switch to Linux. If you’re really talking about video editing, that doesn’t make any sense.nevcairiel - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
If you need this level of performance for productivity, you are not going to use it for 10 years, because at that point it would run at a snails pace.And any sane business will still look to save $25k or so if another machine can make them the same money, without paying the Apple tax.
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link
"If you need this level of performance for productivity, you are not going to use it for 10 years, because at that point it would run at a snails pace."never assume that exponential 'performance' increases are forever. they aren't, as anyone who signed a mortgage in 2007 can attest. the same is true in hardware and software. the physical limits of semi-conductors is within cite. Moore is still true, but on the down low.