I think I’m more excited about the Mac Pro than I was about the iPad Air. Both the base and high end models show US shipping dates of December 30th.
On the low end of the scale, the bare-bones base model (3.7GHz quad-core with 10MB of L3 cache, 12GB (3x4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC, 256 GB flash, Dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM each) is $2,999.
At the tippy top, a fully loaded high-end model (with 2.7GHz 12-core/30MB of L3 cache, 64GB (4x16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC, 1 TB flash, Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each) will set you back $9,599.
There’s also an option to add a Sharp 32″ 4K LED Monitor for $3,595.
I’m very interested to see one up close. Which will probably be the full extent of our relationship.
I spec’d one out on the Canadian Apple site and shipping date was February.
I really do want one–most likely the fully tricked-out model. Can’t wait to learn of its real-world performance, which might be even better than the unit they loaned to Pixar back around WWDC 2012.
I’m also expecting The Foundry to optimize Modo for it, which will be really sweet.
That “tippy top” price is reminiscent to me of when I bought a Mac IIci back in ’88 for about $9K. That was a great little machine which I used productively for a good number of years.
It’s amazing how Apple keeps improving their hardware while keeping their prices down.