Apple Sneaks in Holiday Mac Pro Upgrades

By Dena Cassella December 4, 2009

Sneaky sneaky Apple—today Apple quietly added some more horsepower options to its Mac Pro. If you’re looking to configure a quad-core Mac Pro online at the Apple Store, you may enjoy the new option to add a 3.33GHz Intel Xeon processor to it for an extra $1,200. The current Mac Pro base configuration comes with a 2.66GHz Intel Xeon processor. The fastest eight-core configuration from the lineup has it sporting two 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeons.

Apple also added another new feature to its Mac Pro lineup—the ability to load each hard drive bay on these machines with a 2TB hard drive spinning at 7200 rpm, doubling the storage capacity to 8TB. This feature costs $350 over the original configuration price. What else, you ask? Well, now you can also endow your Xserves with the same optional 2TB hard drive upgrade or outfit all six slots with 4GB RAM modules.

Recommended Videos

Check out Apple’s Online Store for more details.

Topics

Apple

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Haole built. O'ahu grown

Mobile

Best iPad deals: Save on iPad Air, iPad Pro, iPad Mini

iPad Pro 2020 Screen.

Some of the best tablets on the market can be found within the Apple iPad lineup, and of late the iPad has been a great place to turn for some of the best tablet deals. We regularly see discounts on entry-level iPads, but right now we’re seeing models like the iPad Air and iPad Pro with their prices dropped, including the iPad Pro with Apple’s new M4 chip. In fact, iPads make for some of the best Apple deals you can shop right now, and they’d pair well with anything you may find among the current AirPods deals, iPhone deals, and MacBook deals. We’ve tracked down all of the best iPad deals and organized them for your shopping convenience below. Read onward for those details, and check out all of the Samsung tablet deals, Amazon Fire tablet deals, and Surface Laptop and Surface Pro deals going on right now if you want to see what the competition has to offer.
Apple iPad 10.2 (9th Gen) (64GB ) -- $200 $329 39% off

Apple's A13 Bionic chip is no M1 or M2, but it still offers 64-bit architecture and neural engine support for excellent performance. In other words, this 10.2-inch iPad is incredible value. It has a 10.2-inch Retina display, 64GB of storage, supports Touch ID and Apple Pencil (1st Gen), and it's size, plus all-day battery life make it an excellent choice for anyone with an on-the-go lifestyle.

Computing

Teardown of the M4 Mac mini reveals a huge surprise

The Mac mini up on its side on a desk.

Thanks to a video posted on social media showing the inside of the new Mac mini, we now know it has modular storage and the 256GB base model uses two 128GB chips. This is good news for tech enthusiasts who were disappointed with the M2 Mac mini's single 256GB chip since it caused slower SSD speeds.

Two chips allows for parallel reading and writing so jobs can get done faster, but it's important to note that the difference isn't noticeable for most day-to-day tasks. The problem only applied to 256GB models and was primarily a pain point for enthusiasts -- but it's still nice to know that Apple is willing to listen to customers sometimes (not always, though).

Computing

The performance downgrade made to the M4 Pro that no one is talking about

Someone using a MacBook Pro M4.

I've spent this whole week testing the new M4 chip, specifically the M4 Pro in both the Mac mini and 16-inch MacBook Pro. They are fantastic, impressive chips, but in my testing, I noticed something pretty surprising about the way they run that I haven't seen others talk much about. I'm talking about the pretty significant change Apple made in this generation to power modes.

First off, Apple has extended the different power modes to the "Pro" level chips for the first time, having kept it as an exclusive for Max in the past. The three power modes, found in System Settings, are the following: Low Power, Automatic, and High Power. The interesting thing, however, is that in my testing, the Low Power drops performance far more this time around.