We expected some new hardware to be announced by Apple today at the WWDC, and so we got an entirely new and powerful Mac Pro so drastically unique that it could have easily fell out of some alien spaceship. The new 2013 black Mac Pro as we shall now call it, is a thing of bold beauty. An innovative marvel that has put Apple ahead of the industrial design curve once again. Standing just 9.9-inches tall with a diameter of only 6.6-inches, the new black Mac Pro is ridiculously more compact than its silvery aluminum predecessor. It too is made using a machined aluminum enclosure yet it's finished with a polished black finish which is a surprising first for Apple. It's also assembled in the USA. The black, polished cylindrical-shaped Mac Pro may resemble a posh trash can to some though.
But it's what's on the inside the really matters. The new black Mac Pro packs an impressive line of specs for such a compact form factor. It's twice as fast than its predecessor thanks to a 12-Core Intel Xeon CPU, and it also has new ECC memory yielding double the performance from past variants and PCI express-based flash storage that is more than twice as fast as before clocking in 1.25GBps read and 1GBps write speeds. It also features the latest WiFi 802.11ac standard, faster backwards-compatible Thunderbolt 2, dual-workstation AMD FirePro GPUs that support up to three high-resolution 4K external monitors and a host of backlit I/O. Thunderbolt 2 is used to support and transfer 4K video resolution between compatible external displays.
To keep things cool, Apple designed a unified thermal core to absorb heat from the internal hardware that surrounds it using a single, large turbine-like fan that sucks out the hot air captured by the aluminum-made core. The fan blades are designed to operate more quieter, and are similar in design to the ones Apple used to design the Retina MacBook Pro. Apple hasn't divulged over a release date or price unfortunately.