Gearing up for the initial release date of the 2013 Mac Pro in December, Apple has released a selection of five Mac Pro posters to a number of prominent U.S. journalists at Dallas Morning News, CNET, and TidBITS. The posters, which featured images showcasing the redesigned form factor of the new Mac Pro, came with the following message:

“It's the computer we were insane to build. The one that turns conventional thinking on its head, then kicks the living $#&% out of it. We challenged all our assumptions. Abandoned our preconceptions. And blew away limitation after limitation. This is the new Mac Pro. It's like no Mac we've created before. And we can't wait to see what you create with it.”

Apple may soon release these posters to be featured in magazine ads, but for the meantime, these images will be purely promotional; it’s worth checking out Jeff Carlson’s collection of Mac Pro posters he shot with his Nikon D90. Apple has occasionally sent promotional materials to journalists in the past: Earlier this year, Apple chose to release gift cards with 100 handpicked songs in celebration of the 10th anniversary of iTunes in April, and also disseminated a poster celebrating the five-year anniversary of the App Store in July. It’s not surprising Apple would want to hype up its Mac Pro, considering how much it symbolizes Apple’s innovative spirit for radical engineering and design that “just works,” but Apple also needs to help sell the Mac Pro because of its high price point -- the Mac Pro will release in December starting at $2,999.

Apple Mac Pro Release Date Nears: More About The Redesigned Mac Pro

The 2013 Mac Pro is something of a Death Star -- a dense black cylinder designed around a thermal core and brimming with advanced technology. The new Mac Pro is twice as powerful as the previous Mac Pro, which was still the fastest and most expandable Macintosh Apple sold despite its three years on the market. But even with this incredible power, the 2013 Mac Pro is also one-eighth the size of its predecessor with a diameter of 6.6 inches and a height of 9.9 inches, which was all accomplished thanks to a very innovative design built around balancing power and efficiency.

Apple will release the next-generation Mac Pro in December with several different configurations. The entry-level Mac Pro features a 3.7 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor, 12 GB of memory, dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs, and 256 of PCIe-based flash storage built-in. The high-end Mac Pro, which starts at $3,999, features a 3.5 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5 processor (with options to upgrade to eight or 12 cores), up to 64 GB of memory, AMD FirePro D700 GPUs and up to 1 TB of flash storage.

The new Mac Pro is fitted with USB 3, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 1.4 ports, and most importantly six ports for Thunderbolt 2, Apple's new connectivity technology that delivers up to 20Gbps of bandwidth to each external device. But since each Thunderbolt 2 port supports up to six daisy-chained devices, the 2013 Mac Pro is an ideal computer for transferring data between your computer and up to 36 high-performance peripherals, such as external storage devices, PCI expansion chassis, A/V breakout boxes and even the next-generation 4K desktop displays. Thunderbolt 2 makes it easy for the 2013 Mac Pro to connect to peripherals, but users care much more about how quickly they're able to boot up and multitask several applications at once. The 2013 Mac Pro features next-generation PCI Express flash storage, which is up to 2.5 times faster than the fastest SATA-based SSDs and up to 10 times faster than a 7200-rpm SATA hard drive and ideal for launching massive files or applications such as Photoshop or Final Cut.

The ultrafast processing and connectivity of 2013 Mac Pro is made possible by the new unified thermal core; instead of utilizing multiple heat sinks and fans to cool the computer's processor and graphics cards, Apple designed a core out of a single piece of aluminum that maximizes airflow and thermal capacity by conducting heat away from the CPU and GPUs and distributing the heat evenly across the core of the Mac Pro. With this single core, the total thermal capacity of the computer can be shared efficiently among the processors, especially if one processor isn't working as hard as the others.

Obviously, the level of centralized thermal energy in the 2013 Mac Pro required an equally powerful and efficient fan, so again, Apple focused on engineering a single fan large enough to pull air upward through a vent at the bottom of the computer. Apple designed the Mac Pro's fan so air absorbs heat as it travels vertically through the center of the computer and carries it out the top. By also carefully engineering the number, size, shape and spacing of the blades, Apple was able to make the fan in the 2013 Mac Pro surprisingly quiet by minimizing air resistance with backward-curved impeller blades that run at fewer revolutions per minute to draw air more efficiently.

Unlike other Apple devices designed in California but built overseas, the Mac Pro is the first major Apple device that will be manufactured and assembled in the U.S. -- specifically, Texas, Kentucky, Illinois, and Florida, among "a dozen other states across America," according to Apple.

While every 2013 Mac Pro will release in black, Apple SVP Jony Ive teamed up with Marc Newson to create a single, one-of-a-kind Mac Pro with a stunning red finish for the (RED) charity, which benefits the fight against AIDS. The (RED) Mac Pro, which is estimated to sell between $40,000 and $60,000, will be auctioned off by Sotheby’s on Nov. 23 at 7 p.m. EST.

What do you think of the 2013 Mac Pro? Are you looking forward to its December release date? Sound off in the comments section below.

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