“Apple has announced its new Mac Pro professional desktop workstation, and it is 1/8th the volume of the old one,” Joel Santo Domingo writes for PC Magazine. “To get it so small, Apple had to remove one of the primary reasons to get a Mac Pro in the first place: There is no significant internal expansion space in the new 2013 Mac Pro.”
“Apple’s upcoming Mac Pro is an enigma. No, really, there’s a lot about the system we don’t yet know, including exactly which Xeon processors will be available, which dual AMD FirePro GPUs will be in the system, and the ultimate pricing of the Mac Pro,” Santo Domingo writes. “What we do know is that the system comes with replaceable PCIe flash storage as the main drive, four DIMM slots for 1,866MHz DDR3 ECC memory, and that everything is built around a massive heat sink with a single fan for cooling. The system comes with a HDMI port, four USB 3.0 ports, and six Thunderbolt 2 ports.”
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Santo Domingo writes, “Yes, you can connect USB 3.0 drives, Thunderbolt hard drives, and PCIe to Thunderbolt expansion boxes to the new Mac Pro. Expansion boxes like the ones from Sonnet and OWC let you pull the video input or graphics output card to your Thunderbolt Mac. They can also let you connect multiple eSATA drives to a Thunderbolt Mac if your company has standardized on eSATA drives. Displays aren’t a problem either: the system can support up to three 4K displays via Thunderbolt, but you can always connect a single HDMI display to the HDMI port and multiple DVI, VGA, or DisplayPort monitors using adapter cables. Functionally, external expansion can work just fine. External Expansion may work, but it is messy.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Who’s to say Apple or third parties won’t have stackable 6.6-inch diameter “expansion discs” that offer external drives, etc. that match and fit right underneath your Mac Pro and provide neat cord management solutions as well?
Think outside the box.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]