Apple ships new Mac Pro, Xserve ahead of Macworld

Apple got a little business out of the way before next week's
Macworld extravaganza, announcing new versions of the Mac Pro and
Xserve to go along with new Intel chips.

These systems are very high-end computers, designed for heavy work
rather than organizing photos of your latest trip to St. Louis. Both
the Mac Pro and the Xserve are available with two of Intel's Xeon 5400 series quad-core processors, and come with loads of memory and other performance-oriented features, like RAID hard drives.

Apple's Mac business has expanded quite a bit
over the past year or so, but creative professionals are still the base
of that support and these are two products were designed for them,
according to David Moody, vice president of Mac product marketing. Very
few businesses have standardized on Mac OS X Server in the server room,
and therefore the market for the Xserve is somewhat limited. Still,
smaller shops that want to have a Mac OS X environment front to back,
as well as educational customers, are key Xserve customers.

The Mac Pro is a little different, as it represents the most powerful
computer Apple can put together, and is a favorite of graphics
professionals that need tons of horsepower. It's also one of the few
Apple products for which there are dozens of configuration options;
most other Mac products have just three or four choices for
combinations of processor, memory, and storage.

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