Mac Pro fully loaded: $29,000

David Swan
Wednesday, 11 August 2010 23:44

Your IT - Home IT

Following all the hype and fanfare of the iPhone and iPad, Apple has begun taking orders of a different kind, for the Mac Pro.

Customers can expect to pay up to $29,000 for a 'fully equipped' machine, admittedly with an extra display, warranty, and every available software option. The company has said that they won't ship the tower-style desktop to customers for at least another week and a half.

The least expensive option is a standard quad core machine, which comes in at a still significant $3,499 still minus a display or any substantial software. What is included, though, is a 1TB hard drive and a 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 'Nehalem' processor, along with 3GB of memory.

The orders come after Apple announced the refresh of the Mac Pro line just last month when it also revamped the more popular and more consumer-friendly iMac.

The difference between the low-end Mac Pro and the middle to upper-end models seems to be in the processor. Upper-end Mac Pros are equipped with the newer "Westmere" Xeon processors in either eight- or 12-core configurations. The midrange Mac Pro boasts two 2.4-GHz quad-core Xeons, while the top-of-the-line model runs a pair of 2.66-GHz six-Core Xeon processors.

The Nehalem architecture used on the lower-end model is based on a 45-nanometer manufacturing process, while the Westmere chips are 32nm.

All standard configurations of each of the models comes with a 18x dual-layer Superdrive, and ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB GDDR5 as standard.