- The 2006 Mac Pro was released and quickly became a beloved classic
- The Mac Pro had a promising transition from PowerPC to Intel
- The Mac Pro promised double the performance and power with a Xeon processor
The original Mac Pro was released on August 7, 2006 — and it’s still remembered as a high point in Apple history. Now that the line has continued with a brand-new Apple Silicon Mac Pro for 2023, AppleInsider celebrates the old favorite workhorse — and its rather varied sequels.
The 2006 Mac Pro had a promising transition from PowerPC to Intel. Steve Jobs revealed that the long-standing rumor was true, Apple was switching to Intel processors for the Mac. The big news was that every Mac in the range was to have an Intel processor, and that was obviously good. The Mac Pro was the place where power was wanted most, and it was enough of a surprise that Phil Schiller was quick to defend it.
This first Mac Pro did reach Jobs’s promised 3.0GHz performance, and it did so with Intel’s Xeon processor. It also came with greater expansion but still the same enviably easy way of doing that expansion. The enclosure let users simply open the whole side and then just snap in new hard drives without any cabling or fiddling at all. This Mac Pro was deeply customizable, it was wicked fast, it came with 1GB of RAM but could address 32GB of RAM, and it was shipping right now.
The Mac Pro saw several updates over the years, with a speed bump in April 2007 and then version 2,1 lasted until the following January when the 3,1 edition upped the performance with a faster quad-core Intel Xeon 5400 processor. Another significant update was in July 2010 when, as well as moving to Intel’s Xeon 5600-series processors, users could now have up to 64GB RAM and 8TB storage.
However, it wasn’t until WWDC 2013 that the revamped Mac Pro was revealed. It didn’t come in the same “beautiful enclosure” that had lasted since the Power Mac G5 in June 2004, and it was a new enclosure that definitely looked beautiful. With its performance bottlenecks, though, the 2013 Mac Pro was not the real successor to the 2006 Mac Pro that people had wanted.
Apple’s 2013 Mac Pro was a successful machine in its own right, but it was soon forgotten with no updates in 2014 or 2015. After announcing its death in 2017, Apple brought out an iMac Pro that could compete with the 2013 Mac Pro. The 2019 Mac Pro was announced on December 10th and started at $5,999, but a maxed-out version could cost up to $53,000 without including a display.
Apple’s transition to Apple Silicon was a success, and the first machine released was a Mac mini that boasted improved performance at a lower cost. With the Mac Pro, however, it was uncertain whether it would become a favorite like the original 2006 Mac Pro. Finally, the 2023 Apple Silicon Mac Pro was announced, and it offers increased performance and a much lower price tag than its predecessor. Yet, it may not become a beloved classic, as the Mac Studio matches its performance and is cheaper.
