Mac Pro

Background

The Mac Pro completed Apple's transition to Intel processors, replacing the PowerMac G5 (Late 2005) as Apple's professional desktop Mac. The Mac Pro was based on two 64-bit, dual-core Intel Xeon 5100 "Woodcrest" processors, which included a 128-bit Vector Engine. The Mac Pro's case resembled its PowerMac predecessor's--with the exception of a second optical drive bay--but the interior of the case was completely redesigned. The Xeon processors required less heat-dissipation than G5 processors, allowing a smaller cooling system. The Mac Pro had four easily accessible hard drive bays (for a BTO maximum of 2 TB of storage) and easy access to its 8 RAM slots, which allowed for a maximum of 16 GB of RAM. With the Mac Pro, Apple decided to do something different in terms of configuration. Since the majority of Apple's professional customers tended to heavily-customize their Macs at purchase time, Apple offered a single, heavily customizable Mac Pro model. The single model sold for $2,499 U.S., and included two 2.66 GHz, dual-core Intel Xeon 5100 processors, 1 GB of RAM, a 250 GB hard disk, a SuperDrive, and an Nvidia GeForce 7300GT graphics card with 256MB of VRAM. BTO options included 2.0 and 3.0 GHz processors, up to 16 GB of RAM, up to 2 TB of storage, a second SuperDrive, a variety of graphics cards, and AirPort and Bluetooth support.