Apple updates MacPros, Xserve

What's this? Looks like an early present from Apple. In advance of next week's MacWorld Expo, Apple has announced the extremely long-awaited updates to its two highest-end professional lines, the MacPro and the Xserve. Timed to coincide with Intel's Penryn announcement, the advent of these new machines brings Apple into the quad-core, 45nm age. As expected, the new 8-core MacPro tops off with two 3.2Ghz Quad-Core Xeon 5400s, up to 4TB of storage, up to 32GB of RAM (!) and sports ATI's Radeon HD 2600 XT as standard equipment. As if that wasn't enough for you, the MacPro now boasts support for up to four graphics cards, which means that it "can drive up to eight 30-inch displays at once for advanced visualization and large display walls." Wowza! Alternative configurations are available with either one or two 2.8Ghz CPUs or two 3.0Ghz CPUs and the standard configuration (2x 2.8Ghz) will set you back a cool $2800. Apple claims that this "new system architecture...delivers up to twice the performance of its predecessor," but we'll wait for an independent party to verify that claim.  

On the Xserve tip, we're looking at "the most powerful Apple server ever," which packs two Quad-Core 3.0Ghz Intel Xeon 5400s at the high-end. These puppies are 1U rack-optimized, sport two PCI Express 2.0 slots, support up to 3TB of internal storage and can be upgraded with a wealth of other features.

So, this begs the question, why is Apple making product announcements in advance of MacWorld? The answer is, quite simply, because there are only so many products that can be unveiled during the course of one "Stevenote." While new MacPros and Xserves are exciting for the pro customers who have been waiting patiently since August 2006 for an upgrade, they're not exactly the flashiest updates when compared to, oh, I don't know, a new iPhone and ultraportable MacBook Pro. There's also the small matter of those cinema displays and given that the MacPro just got a new graphics card, I'd say that there are definitely a few surprises left for MacWorld...

For more on the new pro machines:
- see this press release on the new MacPro
- and this press release on the new Xserve