Apple Promises Mac Pro Update

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Apple insists it has not forgotten about the Mac Pro-- SVP of global marketing Phil Schiller tells Daring Fireball a "completely rethought" Mac Pro is to launch some time next year.

Mac Pro As one might expect Schiller gives very little details as to what the next generation of Apple pro desktop PC will offer. He does promise it features a "modular system," since Apple reportedly feels "sorry" about the concept behind the Mac Pro.

"The current Mac Pro, as we’ve said a few times, was constrained thermally and it restricted our ability to upgrade it," Schiller says. "And for that, we’re sorry to disappoint customers who wanted that, and we’ve asked the team to go and re-architect and design something great for the future that those Mac Pro customers who want more expandability, more upgradability in the future."

First revealed back in December 2013, the current iteration of the Mac Pro is a black cylinder featuring a 3-sided chassis holding dual-GPUs, processors and memory, and an "innovative unified thermal core." However, while it looks so cool it can be Darth Vader's PC of choice, the cylindrical design is actually "thermally constrained." As software engineering chief Craig Federighi tells TechCrunch, larger GPUs produce more heat than it can handle, and as such the machine cannot handle the workloads demanded by professionals.

In the meantime the Mac Pro gets a first update in 3 years-- the baseline model now features 6 Xeon CPU cores (up from 4) and dual-AMD G500 GPUs (up from AMD G300 GPUs). The more powerful version has 8 CPU cores (up from 6) and dual AMD D800 GPUs (up from AMD D500 GPUs).

Go The Mac Pro Lives (Daring Fireball)

Go Apple Pushes the Reset Button on the Mac Pro (TechCrunch)