If you've not had your head in a hole this week then you'll know that Apple used its WWDC 2023 conference to announce some major-league big-hitters in the form of its Vision Pro headset, among other launches, which included the incredible Mac Pro with all-new M2 Ultra silicon.
Yup, the 'Cheese Grater' is back! Often touted as 'the best Mac ever made' by, well, pretty much everyone, the fact it looks like a large version of a kitchen tool seems all the more apt – because you'll never guess how much cheddar the new Mac Pro will set you back when fully kitted out.
When Apple revealed its Mac Studio at WWDC 2023, whispers of 'woah, surely that's so powerful it spells the end of the Mac Pro?' could be heard around the T3 team's office (well, virtual office in Slack). But hell no, Apple quickly followed up with a 'hold my beer' moment to reveal the Mac Pro and jaws hit the floor.
Starting at $6,999/£7,199, as you can see, the Mac Pro is unapologetically pricey. It's also unapologetically powerful, because it only comes with Apple's M2 Ultra chip as standard, which effectively combines two M2 Max dies into one and laughs in the face of any processing tasks you may wish to throw at it.
At that price, of course, it's not a Mac for the casual user. You need to be doing work that requires some seriously heavy lifting. But seeing as the Pro can convert 24 streams of 4K raw footage into ProRes in real-time – which, c'mon, is freakin' ridiculous – without apparently breaking a sweat, for CPU/GPU fiends this new Mac will be a dream machine.
But back to the original question: how much is the new Mac Pro kitted out to its maximum? Well, upgrade from the 60-core to 76-core GPU and that's $/£1,000 more. Want 192GB of unified memory (I know, wild)? That's another $/£1,600. Might as well top-up the 1TB SSD to an 8TB one, too, right? That's $/£2,200 more.
Your grand total: $11,799/£11,999. By which point you may as well add the wheels for $/£400 more, 'cos breaking the 12K mark (yes, twelve grand) seems like a must-do. Indeed, that's a lot of cheddar to drop on an Apple product. But for those high-end professionals and studios who'll find it makes their lives better – indeed their work better – whilst looking extra cool, it's going to be a machine with massive appeal.
