The newest Mac Pro desktop models go on sale today, and while the base model costs just a dollar under six grand, add-ons bring the top-of-the-line version to $52,599.
An Apple exec was in Washington today answering questions from and getting berated by Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee who are mad about encryption. But meanwhile, on the retail front, Apple's new Mac Pro is out, and Apple fans the world over are salivating at the processing capabilities and storage capacities available to those with unlimited budgets.
As The Verge explains, if you take the basic $5,999 Mac Pro with its octa-core Intel Xeon CPU, 256 gigabytes of storage and measly 32 gigabytes of RAM, and you start adding RAM, storage capacity, and processing power, the cost ticks up quickly. And as Digital Trends writes today, why would anyone even want the basic model when "what really makes the Mac Pro stand out is its modularity and room for expansion."
From The Verge, the pricing of high-end add-ons:
Processor: a 28-Core, 2.5GHz Intel Xeon W with 28 cores, 56 threads, and Turbo Boost up to 4.4GHz (a $7,000 add-on)
RAM: 1.5TB of 2933MHz RAM, broken down into 12 128GB user-replaceable slot (a $25,000 add-on)
SSDs: 4TB of SSD storage, split across two 2TB SSDs (a $1,400 add-on. Apple notes that an 8TB option will be offered soon, meaning that you’ll be able to spend even more here in the future.
GPU: two AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo graphics card modules, each with two GPUs inside for a total of four graphics cards, each with 32GB of dedicated RAM per GPU (a $10,800 add on)
Then there's an optional $2,000 Afterburner accelerator card, wheels and a trackpad, and you're looking at $52,599. That's more than a Tesla Model 3! MacWorld also notes it's more than the sticker price of a 2020 Corvette convertible.
And that doesn't even include a monitor! Add the Pro Display XDR and a stand, and we get up to $58,597 before taxes.
Your wealthy graphic designer and video-editing friends would no doubt enjoy all of this power. But when do we officially reach overkill? Do you need to store the whole Library of Congress in your Mac Pro?
