just barely making their December
release date Apple has finally released
the brand new Mac Pro so if Santa was
exceptionally good to you leaving you a
post holiday surplus of anywhere in the
range of three to eleven thousand
dollars you can pick one up for yourself
we got ours first thing this morning and
put it directly on our teardown table
let's tear this tube down hi I'm Gwen
Dillon with iFixit and today we're
tearing down the brand new Mac Pro this
is a landmark release for Apple as it's
not only their first machine assembled
entirely in the United States it's also
the first major redesign of the pro line
since 2006 and what a major redesign it
is visually the new Mac Pro is a radical
departure from the previous versions of
the Mac Pro and desktop computing as a
whole replacing the standard rectangular
desktop design with a super sleek and
shiny cylinder this new Mac Pro measures
in at 251 point 46 millimeters in height
167 point 64 millimeters in diameter and
a super light four point nine kilograms
in weight on the back or around the bend
I guess you can see all the available
connections which consists of six
Thunderbolt 2 ports for USB 3 ports HDMI
and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports it also
has the standard 3.5 millimeter speaker
and headphone jack we've only just begun
and we're already loving the opening
process with the flick of a switch the
encasement tube is off and now we get
our first look inside isn't that nice
the first chamber reveals so much
goodness when we find vertical ram slots
at either side of the i/o panel and the
great news keeps coming this ram is
super easy to access and replace our
baseline unit came with 12 gigabytes of
RAM in the form of three four gigabyte
ddr3l SDRAM chips you could however max
out your ram at 64 gigabytes using 4 16
gigabyte chips after the RAM we check
out the SSD assembly that is held in
place by only one non proprietary t8
screw our Mac shipped with a 256
gigabyte SSD manufactured by Samsung but
if you have an additional $800 you can
max out your storage at one terabyte
with the SSD removed we turn our
attention to the fan that's right I said
fan not fans
the Mac Pro cools all of its high-end
tech with a single large fan that pulls
air from under the case through the core
and out the top so make sure you don't
put anything on top of your pro or
you'll block it's efficient and
surprisingly quiet cooling system
speaking of cooling the Mac Pro uses a
huge triangular heatsink that is shared
by two graphics cards and to get those
cards off we started by disconnecting
the data connectors at the bottom of the
boards once we remove the 8 t10 screws
holding on the heatsink clamps the cards
came right off our Mac Pro came with
dual AMD FirePro d300 GPUs with 2
gigabytes of gddr5 vram each as we take
off the dotter board we marvel at the
novel disk shape it's not everyday you
get to see a round circuit board and
once we pull back the small grille we
find where Apple has hidden the power
supply with the power supply and i/o
board removed we uncover the third side
of the triangular heatsink and on it we
find the logic board removing the logic
board we find the CPU stuck to the
heatsink
the thermal compound kept the CPU stuck
behind when we pulled the logic board
away the fact that the CPU hasn't been
integrated into the logic board makes
replacing or upgrading the CPU only a
realistic possibility our Mac Pro came
with a 3.7 gigahertz quad-core intel
xeon e5 processor lastly we separated
the port board from the power supply it
seems all the available ports have been
consolidated into one card so if one of
your USB or Thunderbolt ports goes bad
you'll need to replace all the ports on
your machine to fix it we've come to the
end of our teardown which means it's
time to talk repairability and iFixit
it's our mission to teach people how to
repair everything so we give every
gadget we tear down a repair ability
score between 1 and 10 10 being the
easiest to repair and 1 being the most
difficult the late 2013 Mac Pro got a 8
and here's why on the upside for being
so compact the design is surprisingly
modular and easy to disassemble
non-proprietary Torx screws are used
throughout and several components can be
replaced independently the easily opened
case is designed to make RAM upgrades a
snap the fan is easy to access and
replace and while it will require a bit
of digging the CPU is user replaceable
but on the downside because of some
proprietary new connectors and tight
cable routing working on this device
without a repair manual will be tricky
and risky for a $3,000 machine for the
complete teardown including tons of
beautiful high quality images head on
over to ifixit.com
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