Another highly anticipated move from Apple at this week’s World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) was the unveiling of the Intel-based replacement to the PowerMac G5, the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro completes Apple’s transition to Intel hardware under the hood of all of its machines, (and is the welcome final nail in the coffin for Mac OS 9) and is shipping now. The form factor and aesthetic of the case hasn’t changed one biton the surface, (with the exception of being able to put in two optical drives) but under the hood and behind the door of the case, the system is very very different than its G5 predecessor.

The Mac Pro sports a pair of Intel’s Core2 Duo Xeon (Woodcrest family) 64-bit processors, (that’s right, 4 64-bit cores) between 2Ghz each to 3Ghz each that prove significantly faster than its predecessor, although benchmarks aren’t quite in yet. Additionally, the Mac Pro sports 4 hard drive bays that can each support 500GB hard drives, can be configured for 2 superdrives, and can support up to 16GB of RAM. The default $2,499 USD configuration comes with a 250GB hard drive, an NVidia GeForce 7300GT video card, and 1GB of memory. It’s shipping now, so expect to see them shortly should people decide its finally time to upgrade, now that all available Macs are Intel Based.

[ MacWorld :: WWDC - Apple Announces the Mac Pro ]

[ Apple :: Mac Pro ]