Mac Pro Server quietly introduced as Xserve heads for the grave, starts at $3,000
Sneaky Apple... real sneaky. Just as the company announced that it would be axing its rack-mountable Xserve come January 31st, in flies an all-new Mac Pro to effectively take its place. The Mac Pro Server -- which is slated to ship in "two to four weeks" -- has joined the fray this morning on Apple's website, with the workstation equipped with a single 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Xeon 'Nehalem' processor, 8GB (4 x 2GB) of DDR3 ECC SDRAM, a pair of 1TB (7200RPM) hard drives, one 18x SuperDrive, ATI's Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB of GDDR5 video memory, and a fresh copy of Mac OS X Server (the unlimited-client license version, for those wondering). Curiously enough, this marks the second time Apple has thrown a "server edition" into the mix, with the Mac mini Server popping up in June. As you'd expect, the $2,999 base price can be pushed far north by slapping in a pair of 2.93GHz six-core 'Westmere' chips (a modest $3,475 increase), 32GB of RAM (only an extra $3,400), a Mac Pro RAID card (pocket change at $700) and a quad-channel 4Gb fibre channel PCIe card (just an extra grand). But hey, financing is available!
[Thanks, Adrian]