We spoke with a source close to Apple this weekend and they say that Apple are likely to ship the new Mac Pro in October. In Europe the Mac Pro has been absent for some time, due to a change in regulatory standards. It was removed from sale in 27 countries as of March 1st. Business users will be waiting on the new Mac Pro with baited breath.
Apple are already pimping out the new machine on their website. Gone is the familiar silver aluminium chassis, replaced with an ominous new black casing which has caused a stir globally. You can view the teaser page over here. We still aren't quite sure what to make of the cooling system, but it is certainly unusual.
So why the radical new design? Well, since Steve Jobs left the company have been under scrutiny for not releasing anything radical or ground breaking. The new design of the Mac Pro will surely answer that. We don't know how efficient the cooling or design will be yet, but there has not been anything like this to date. It does look rather tricky for upgrading however, but the jury is still out.
Apple are waiting on enough E5 processors and motherboards for the units to go on sale. This will happen late Q3 2013. Our sources indicate that limited units may hit retail late September, but it will be October before they sell en masse globally.
Apple are likely to be also waiting on the new operating system Mavericks, which will replace Mountain Lion. Mountain Lion is currently limited to recognising 96GB of memory and hard core editors will want to avail of 128GB. There is no release date yet for Mavericks, but we would imagine it will hit in October. Appleinsider were discussing Thunderbolt 2 and they claim it will not be ready until the end of 2013, with a ramp in 2014. Apple may go ahead with the release of the new Mac Pro and update the model in 2014.
Rumours have also been circulating that Apple will be releasing a 4k HDTV screen which will suit a specific professional audience interested in the new Mac Pro system. Apple will certainly be pushing Intel for the TB2 chipset which supports a 4k resolution natively.
Kitguru says: Nothing is confirmed, but our sources do seem confident that Apple will release the new Mac Pro by October.