Apple's 'Made in America'

Apple's 'Made in America' Mac Pro goes on sale; starts at $2,999

Apple's new cylindrical Mac Pro has been put up for sale in the US. The ultra-powerful machine is priced starting at $2,999 and is assembled in Austin, Texas. Apple isn't making the Pro available for immediate pick up at a retail store. Customers must order online or at a store for delivery or store pickup. Initial orders will be shipped right away, but backups of days or weeks are possible going forward

The India availability has not been announced, although Apple's India website does list the wondrous-looking machine as coming soon. The space-saving desktop is just over 9-inches tall and one-eighth the volume of the previous Mac Pro. Apple has built it around a unified thermal core that allows the system to share thermal capacity across all the processors. It also gets an innovative fan, which makes it as quiet as the Mac Mini.

Now in stores, but buyers will have to order online

Apart from the new design, the Mac Pro packs in the latest Intel Xeon processors with up to 12 cores, dual workstation-class GPUs, six Thunderbolt 2 ports, PCIe-based flash storage and ultra-fast ECC memory. Apple claims that it offers two times the performance compared to its predecessor with the latest Intel Xeon E5 processors, up to 64GB of RAM, dual AMD FirePro graphics chips with up to 6GB of dedicated memory, and up to 1TB of far faster PCI Express solid state storage. Users will have to rely on the machine’s generous supply of six Thunderbolt 2 ports and four USB 3 ports to connect peripherals or add storage options.It can be powered by 4-core, 6-core, 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon processors running at Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9GHz. Two workstation-class AMD FirePro GPUs with up to 12GB of video memory provide up to seven teraflops of compute power and up to eight times the graphics performance of the previous generation Mac Pro, says Apple. It is also capable of editing full-resolution 4K video streams and playing them in real time.The base model will include an Intel 3.7GHz Xeon E5 processor, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of flash storage, and two AMD FirePro D300 GPUs (capable of supporting up to three 4K displays). The $3,999 (approx Rs 2,46,058) model gets 6-core 3.5GHz Xeon E5 processor, 16GB of RAM, 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage, and two AMD FirePro D500 GPUs. Users can also opt for configure-to-order options.