New Mac Pro Available To Order, Already Backordered Until February

new-mac-pro-available-backordered

The good news for musicians interested in the new Mac Pro computers is that they are now available to order at Apple’s site.

The bad news is that they are already backordered until February. 

The Mac Pro features the latest Intel Xeon processors, dual workstation-class GPUs, PCIe-based flash storage, and ultra-fast ECC memory. Preliminary Geekbench tests suggest that the new models will offer ‘improved performance…by most measures, ranging from slight improvements for certain tasks to substantial improvements for others.”

Based on these early tests, it looks like the new Mac Pros will offer about twice the overall performance of current MacBook Pro and iMac models. Actual performance gains will vary depending on tasks and may require application updates.

The Mac Pro is available starting at $2,999.

42 thoughts on “New Mac Pro Available To Order, Already Backordered Until February”

    1. Considering the AMD FirePros are Mac Pro only cards this would be an interesting trick, especially getting it all into that form factor! Feel free to link us to the components….

        1. Do you really think no one else is capable of assembling a PC? That’s summer work for teens, bro. If you’re an adult and you still working as a PC tech I can assure you no one is jealous…

          Now the “D series” cards are not sold to consumers, but the closest equivalent to the D700 is W9000 which according to your own link costs $3,271.88 each, so double that and you’re up to $6,543 just for the video cards, i’ll let you price out the rest yourself…

            1. oh and by the way bro, the new Mac Pro is equipped with dual D500 and not D700 like you claim (at least the 4000$ model shown on top of this page).

              The D700 equivalent is the W8000, which Amazon has it retailing at 1,308.USD. Double that and you got roughly 2600$ of video cards.

              Get your facts right bro, don’t get offended. A real tech is platform agnostic and will evolve with technology.

          2. Thanks to all the 22 people upvoting the lie the user “lol” said about the AMD Firepro cards and the 11 people downvoting the truth about them. You guys are really insecure and are interpreting a fact correction as an attack on your favorite brand. This is seriously lame.

            Again, the new Mac Pro use dual D500 priced at about $2600, and NOT D700 at $6,543 as claimed by user “lol” (who never did refute that fact by the way).

            So you guys learn to deal with the truth, and understand that being critical or correcting facts is not an attack on your favorite brand. Do you guys know how we call people who do perceive critics and corrections as attacks : fanboys, and you will have downvoted this for that reason only.

            1. why can’t you use a handle? afraid of being e-bullied?
              calm down ‘bro’ – if you don’t like mac products don’t read about them, they really seem to get you all fired up….

              1. What do you mean by “handle”? You think something like foeny519 would be better and more representative of my online personnality?

                So calling out the guy who lies about the Firepro cards being mac only and the false pricing he presented is “all fired up” for you? I guess you are not used to argumentation.

                Also when did I ever said I didn’t liked Mac product? It must’ve came out of your imagination because I have never said such a thing. I hope you are aware that you can still like something and be critical of some aspects of it?

                1. its just hard to take anyones opinion seriously when they aren’t willing to admit that its their own opinion – I’m sure my opinions/posts on this site have not sat well with others at points, but I’m more then willing to let it be known who is expressing said opinion. i didn’t mean anything involving an online personality.

                  1. “its just hard to take anyones opinion seriously when they aren’t willing to admit that its their own opinion”

                    Now you are just playing with semantics, unless the real question is how do you really know if its ones opinion or not? But seriously to me its pretty clear which part of someone’s comment is opinion and which part is facts.

    2. People always say that they can build hackintoshes for half as much and then spec them out with crap parts!

      This offers twice the performance of a MacBook Pro, for about twice as much. Either the extra power is worth it to you or not.

      1. I think the reason for that so far from what I have read, is that apple puts the cheapest parts in their pcs, building a hackintosh, you have to use compatible parts, or parts that apple uses, so as not to cause kernel crashes, and such. And yes the motherboards they use are crap, I may be completely wrong but that’s what I got out of reading about parts for Mac / Hack.

    3. Hooray for real Macs featuring the indispensable $300 extended warranty. Apple honors that like MAD. They once saved my ass on the terms they set, with NO FRICTION in the process. One repair visit for a Mac could cost you $400; a pal got such a bill once and swallowed his tongue! 😛 If you are a boffin for whom a hacked item will do, hats off to ya, but pro-rated, both financially and personally, Apple stands out for behaving like serious ADULTS. Its rare that I want to trumpet any company these days, but Apple earns its place.

    4. Half the price for half the reliability. If you need these specs then its presumed you probably are a professional and a professional needs total reliability, Someone who’s income depends on a computer like this needs something that will work perfectly for the next five to ten years, not a mish mash hackintosh project that will never be able to be reliably upgraded or updated. mackintoshes are cool, but there is a reason nobody will ever use them professionally.

      1. Because looks is not the main reason why I use computers.

        Because you seem to believe that every other computer brand has only been doing beige boxes for the past 20 years, do you also believe Apple invented the mp3 player?

    2. Would you like it better if it was painted like R2D2? If I had one, it’d look like a cross between a 25th-century Accu-jac and a “Futurama” night light in no time.

  4. The BIG questions for us audio folks are:

    Will the GPU-power be available in DAWs and plugins anytime soon?
    Will it also be on the Win- and Linux-side?
    AMD-only?

  6. If your main thrust is music, this is probably not the right Mac for you. This thing is equipped to do serious animation or handle similar loads, like being a hefty server. Audio is a breeze next to intensive graphics. Its too easy to say “Only Hans Zimmer would need this,” but a lesser Mac with 8 gb of RAM can handle enormous work loads. I’m a satisfied Mac user, so I’m impressed overall, but its also partially like moaning over not having a Prophet-12 when you already had a Prophet ’08 and a Tetra. I’m looking at a new Mac, but I don’t need the $4k model when I have yet to strain the one that ran me $1400. Buy solidly rather than falling for gloss or specs that won’t really end up furthering your game.

  7. if you look at the strengths and main features this new mac has, you can clearly see what market is most important for apple. 4K Video, Loads of RAM and connectors for massive amounts of data.

    you will probably find this computer more on rendering/broadcasting and video cutting desks than music studios.

    1. Curious, how would they make something more for musicians? I wouldn’t want a fancy sound card built in.

      I mean, mac mini w/ thunderbolt and your choice of audio interface, seems like it’d work for many. It’s small, imo, all things considered, reasonably priced, just imagine osx, now with free updates, is $300 of the price. 🙂 OS has good MIDI support, you get access to one of the best values in software with Logic at $200, etc.

      And lot of people that are getting well paid to do music are doing it in service to video, so i can see where the mac pro could be useful too…

  8. I’ve been a Mac user for years but I have to say I’m more and more considering jumping ship and grabbing a more powerful PC… for less money. I may feel different had I gone the Mac Pro route instead of an iMac, watching technologies like SSD and USB3 pass me is a bit frustrating (but I guess that’s my fault for falling for Apple’s form over function design of the iMac…)

    In any case, Windows 7 which I use at work has been extremely stable for music production. Add to that the fact that Apple seems to be moving more into an iOS direction with their latest desktop OS version, PLUS the fact that some software developers are already starting to drop support for Snow Leopard (read: Native Instruments installers which is a whole other sore subject….) , and the reasons to stay Mac for me are really dwindling.

    1. The iMac uses SSD and USB3, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.

      The people that parrot “OS X is becoming like iOS” have clearly never used OS X.

      Snow Leopard is from 2009. So what if developers are dropping it?

      1. I have a 2010 iMac so no SSD or USB3. And dropping support for a 4-year old OS, which many musicians still prefer to more recent OS releases, is not OK for developers to do. Perhaps the iOS analogy wasn’t the most appropriate way of saying this – what I mean is that a lot of the OS is now obscured and hidden from the user in favor of a more “simplified” way of doing things.

        1. > a lot of the OS is now obscured and hidden from the user in favor of a more “simplified” way of doing things

          Name one way in which this is true.

  9. The problem is that the majority of software today doesn’t take full advantage of multiple cores. In the end it doesn’t matter that your computer has 6 cores if none of your software takes advantage of them (because why should they? 6 cores are not standard issue today). Granted one can say it’s an investment for the future, but you really need a lot of foresight to justify such a steep price (that is if you’re the one to pony up for it and not a wealthy employer).
    RAM on the other hand is always good to have as much as possible and also a huge hard drive. So my suggestion to Apple is to just take out a few cores and thusly lower the price.

    1. In a way, you’re right… It’s probably not the Mac for everyone, and not all DAW/Application do use multi-core. (I would really like to see how Maschine 2.0 works on this kind of computer, it seems to use very well the multi-core).

      Anyway, for anyone relying a lot on software/plugins, it could be the “ultimate computer”. If we look at the price we can spend on ROMpler keyboard (Motif, Fantom, Kronos, etc…), it’s pretty much the same. And with this kind of Mac Pro, I’m sure you can already run a hell of sample libraries (since we can do it with a Mac Mini already). So once we consider our computer as an instrument, it’s no more crazy to buy a $3,000 computer than a $3,000 digital keyboard. (Analog keyboard are another story 🙂 🙂 ).

      At apple, the small version with less core is the Mac Mini (which is already very capable). So I’m more curious to know more about the future Mac Mini that should come in the next couple of months (I think). It might be just good enough for Music guys, while the Mac Pro will fit for the 3D/Video guys (and rich Music guys ;)).

      Of course, if someone gives me a 12-core Mac Pro with 64GB RAM, I will take it without any doubt, but I’m still gonna wait to check the future Mac Mini and the first real comparison for “Music” usage.

      Wait & See 😉

  10. 3k is not a lot of money to a pro – but missing a deadline because of a slow computer or a Hackintosh cack-up could be a huge deal.

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