Apple Mac Pro 2013 vs. Mac Pro 2012: spec showdown

By Jacob O'Gara October 22, 2013

apple mac pro 2013 vs 2012 388809 schiller and wwdc 13 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

At its latest event in San Francisco, Apple provided additional details regarding the new Mac Pro. Overall, the new Mac Pro is lighter, smaller and runs on the new Mavericks operating system. It also sports unconventional aesthetics which make it worthy of a starring role in a certain Stanley Kubrick sci-fi epic.

The new Mac Pro is also significantly cheaper, with consumers likely to smile ear to ear when they see the $800 price drop over last year’s model. However, if there’s one area where last year’s Mac Pro trumps its younger cousin, its storage space. The new Mac Pro wields a 256GB SSD, while the previous-gen Mac Pro sports 8TB of hard drive space. Sure, SSDs are blazing fast, but storage is a premium when it comes to creative professionals like photographers and videographers, whose files would likely eat up plenty of hard drive space in no time.

To give you a clearer idea of how last year’s Mac Pro stacks up with Apple’s latest refresh, we lined up the specs of both machines side by side. This way, you get a simple picture of how they compare.

	Mac Pro 2013	Mac Pro 2012 Image used with permission by copyright holder
Dimensions	9.9″ x 6.6″	20.1″ x 8.1″
Weight	11 pounds	39.9 pounds
Processor	3.7 GHz Quad-Core, Intel Xeon E5	3.46 GHz Quad Core, Intel Xeon
RAM	12GB DDR3 ECC memory	6GB DDR3 ECC memory
Graphics	Dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs	ATI Radeon HD 5770
Storage	256GB SSD	8TB
Networking	Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0	Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1
Ports	4 USB 3, 6 Thunderbolt, 2 Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 1.4	USB: 5 FireWire 800: 4 Ethernet: 2 Ethernet type: 10/100/1000 (Gigabit) DVI: 1 Mini DisplayPort: 2 3.5mm headphone: 2 3.5mm line-in / microphone: 1 Digital optical audio (S/PDIF): 2
Operating System	OS X Mavericks	OS X 10.8
Price	$2,999	$3,799

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Jacob O’Gara is an editorial assistant at Digital Trends, where he writes about everything from video games to…

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