The Mac is Back

June 10, 2013 — by Per Christensson

Finally! Apple announced the new Mac Pro today. It is completely redesigned and totally awesome.

I providentially tuned into the WWDC keynote about two minutes before Phil Schiller introduced the new Mac Pro. When I heard the announcement, I may have run around the room a few times waving my hands and cheering loudly. It's a good thing that I wasn't physically present at the keynote, as I may have been dragged out by security.

I predicted the next Mac Pro would be a third of the size of the previous model. Apple reduced the size to one eighth. That means the new model is about 12.5% the size of the previous Mac Pro. Not only is it super compact, it is shaped like a cylinder, which houses a "thermal core" for heat distribution.

The new Mac Pro supports up to 12 Intel Xeon processor cores, includes super fast 1866 MHz ECC DDR3 RAM, has dual AMD FirePro GPUs, and standard PCIe-based flash storage. I had hoped the new Mac Pro would include four Thunderbolt ports, but Apple beat my expectations and added six Thunderbolt ports. Awesome. Best of all, the new model supports three 4K displays right out of the box.

I am thrilled about the new Mac Pro. The only negative is that the release date is "later this year," which means I'll have to wait awhile to get one. Most importantly, this new model shows that that Apple has not forgotten about us pro users. For me, that is the best news from WWDC this year.