Apple Mac Pro shipping estimates slip to April

Apple’s online stores in the U.S. and the U.K. on Tuesday changed shipping estimates of the latest Mac Pro desktops to April, delaying the highly-anticipated product by another month. The reasons why Apple cannot ship the new workstations immediately are still not clear.

Apple’s new Mac Pro utilizes numerous proprietary components specifically designed for the cylindrical desktop and is assembled in the USA. Theoretically, insufficient supply of just one component could limit the output of Mac Pro. Moreover, since production capacities in the U.S. may be limited and the demand for the new workstation may be very high early in the lifecycle, it is possible that Apple simply cannot make enough units. The situation naturally gets more complicated since configurations of Mac Pro differ and the systems likely need to pass certain tests before shipping.

Originally, Apple planned to ship its Mac Pro in December. Shortly after it began to sell the new desktop PCs online, it started to notify about delays of shipments to February, 2014. In January it notified its own stores that it would only start to sell Mac Pro in retail in March or April; in late January the company said it would deliver the systems ordered online only in March. Now, Apple claims that the Mac Pros ordered today will ship in April.

It is not a secret that Apple’s products can face unexpectedly high demand early in their lifecycles. However, Mac Pro may set records when it comes to delays of shipments.

The new Apple Mac Pro can be powered by four-core, six-core, eight-core or 12-core Intel Xeon processors, running at Turbo Boost frequencies up to 3.9GHz. The new Mac Pro ECC DDR3 memory runs at 1866MHz in quad-channel mode, which provides up to 60GB/s of memory bandwidth, twice that of the previous generation Mac Pro. Two workstation-class AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with up to 12GB of video memory provide up to 7TFLOPS of compute power and up to eight times the graphics performance of the previous generation Mac Pro. The latest workstation from Apple also features PCIe-based solid-state storage that delivers sequential read speeds up to whopping 1.2GB/s, which is more than double the SATA III based solid-state drives used today. The price of the new Mac Pro starts at $2999 (£2499 in the U.K.).

KitGuru Says: Average selling price of a Mac was around $1300 in Q4 2013. In case the ASP of Apple’s PCs will get significantly high during the ongoing quarter, then it will be obvious that the demand for the Mac Pro was extraordinary. In case the ASP will not grow significantly, then it will mean that the company simply could not produce enough desktops… 

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