New Mac Pro available to order now

The new Mac Pro is finally available online in the Apple Store! Back in June, Apple gave everyone a sneak peek of the upcoming update to the Mac Pro at WWDC. You could probably hear the sound of geek jaws dropping around the world as Apple unveiled a sleek, black, tube-like device, as far as you can get from the heavy, aluminum behemoth of the Power Mac G5 introduced in 2003. I’ll let that sink in. Yes, the design of the Mac Pro has not changed in 10 years. This from the company that changed the look of their computers about every other year since the iMac was introduced.

Anyway, people at WWDC were pretty happy that Apple was ready to start innovating with the Mac Pro again. The best part was that Apple pushed the innovation to the inside with a Xeon E5 processor, based on Intel’s Ivy Bridge micro architecture, with configurations of 12-cores planned. The next step was to announce that the new Mac Pro would be available “sometime in December”. No hints were given by Apple as to the final release date even as we moved into December. The only clue was a rumor from a German retailer stating it would be Dec. 16th. Well, he was close, only 3 days off. So now it’s available in two standard configurations (shown below), and a number of build to order options including;

• 6-core, 8-core, or 12-core processing
• Dual AMD FirePro GPUs with up to 6 GB of GDDR5 VRAM each
• Up to 64 GB 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC memory
• PCIe-based flash storage up to 1 TB

Shipping date is listed as Dec. 30th, so you won’t be able to open one on Christmas morning. Clicking on the “Check availability” link reveals that for now, orders will ship directly to your selected store for pickup. Not sure whether to read this as an indication that the Mac Pro won’t be in retail stores until the 30th or not. For those of you ordering one now, I envy you.