Apple Upgrades The Mac Pro

Andrew — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 04:54:19 +0000

What is to come at MacWorld 2008? We won’t know for sure till next tuesday, but that does not stop Apple Inc. from making some pre-MacWorld announcements. Today Apple Inc. announced updates to the current Mac Pro line and the Xserver line of products.

The Xserver had a long awaited upgrade with its last upgrade in august of 2006. The new servers have a standard configuration of a single 2.8 GHZ Quad-Core Xeon processor with a 1600 MHz front side bus and 2GB of 800 MHz DDR ECC FB-DIMM ram, and all of this for just a suggested retail price of $2,999.

The Mac Pro now comes standard with two 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Penryn processors making it have a total of 8-cores, 2GB of 800 MHz DDR ECC FB-DIMM ram, and a suggested retail price of $2,799. The suggested retail price has been raised from $2,299 to $2,799 this is a significant jump of $500. The next Apple desktop product below the Mac Pro is the iMac at a price of $1,199, this leaves a gap of $1,600 in Apple’s desktop line of computers.

This is a big gap in their product line, and it makes me ask myself what is to come at MacWorld for this category? While there has not been any recent rumors of this to come at MacWorld, there have been rumors from about a year ago that points to a new design coming for the Mac Pro. The design of the current Mac Pro is just great and it would be a shame if that were to change. This makes me think that the rumor of a new design for the Mac Pro is actually for a new desktop computer that has the upgradability and look of a Mac Pro but in a smaller form factor. I have no sources for this, but I would say that the new Mac that I am suggesting would have 2 hard drive slots instead of the 4 drives that that the Mac Pro has and ram that can be upgraded just as easy as the Mac Pro, but all of this with half of the processing power as the current Mac Pro.

That is all I have for now, tomorrow I will expand on this with my MacWorld 2008 Predictions.

Andrew

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Apple Upgrades The Mac Pro