Apple Announces New Mac Hardware

The LED Cinema Display

Coming “soon,” Apple’s new 27-inch glossy LED IPS 16:9 display will set you back $999.

Apple PR:

With built-in MagSafe charging, iSight camera, speakers, and USB ports, the LED Cinema Display is ideal for MacBook and MacBook Pro users,”said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With its massive 2560 x 1440 resolution, the new 27-inch LED Cinema Display is a perfect fit with our powerful new Mac Pro, and it gives iMac users an easy way to double their screen real estate.

The $799 24-inch model is still on sale at Apple’s online store.

The Revamped iMac

With Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 processors powering the new machines, my bet is that they are still crazy fast. New ATI video cards are making an appearance here, including the very beefy ATI Radeon HD 5750 in the new quad-core iMac. This video card has a mind-blowing 1GB of video RAM.

The 27-inch model now includes a build-to-order SSD option as the primary (or secondary!) drive, both of which are firsts for the iMac line.

Apple PR:

Dual-core Intel Core i3 and Core i5, and quad-core Core i5 and Core i7 processors set a new benchmark for iMac performance. The processors feature an integrated memory controller to access the system memory directly, allowing the new iMac to take full advantage of its faster 1333 MHz memory. New discrete ATI Radeon HD processors deliver incredibly smooth, crisp graphics for the most demanding 3D games, creative software and technical applications. iMac displays feature IPS technology to deliver a brilliant image across a wide 178 degree viewing angle. The SD card slot on the iMac now supports the SDXC format to handle the latest high-capacity storage cards. Customers of the 27-inch iMac have the option to order a 256GB solid state drive (SSD) as a primary or secondary drive. The iMac SSD supports up to 215 MB/s data transfer rates for faster startup and application launch times.

All 4 of the new iMacs are for sale online now.

Apple Still Makes the Mac Pro?

The Mac Pro has been languishing for almost a year without an update. Today, Apple changed that. I’ll jump straight to the press release:

At the heart of the new Mac Pro’s performance are next generation quad-core and 6-core Intel Xeon processors running at speeds up to 3.33 GHz. These multi-core processors use a single die design so each core can share up to 12MB L3 cache to improve efficiency while increasing processing speed. These systems feature an integrated memory controller for faster memory bandwidth and reduced memory latency; Turbo Boost to dynamically boost processor speeds up to 3.6 GHz; and Hyper-Threading to create up to 24 virtual cores. The Mac Pro now comes with the ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics processor with 1GB of memory and customers can configure-to-order the even faster ATI Radeon HD 5870 with 1GB of memory.

For the first time, Mac Pro customers have the option to order a 512GB SSD for the ultimate in reliability and lightning fast performance. With the ability to install up to four SSD drives in the system’s internal drive bays, the new Mac Pro can provide ultra high-speed disk bandwidth and random disk performance, two times faster than the average performance of a standard disk drive. Mac Pro also now features two Mini DisplayPorts and one dual-link DVI port. The additional Mini DisplayPort output allows customers to connect two LED Cinema Displays without an additional graphics card or adapter and the dual-link DVI port supports legacy DVI-based displays up to a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels.

  1. Holy crap.
  2. DVI is legacy?
  3. Holy crap.