Apple quietly upgrades the Mac Pro, discontinues the 17-inch MacBook Pro

It seems the company’s flagship product, the Mac Pro, was not worthy of a mention at the WWDC keynote yesterday because the product has received a quiet update after the event was over. Unfortunately, if you have been waiting for a significant update to this product, you are in for a disappointment.

The biggest change here are the new CPU. You now have three models, in quad-core, 12-core and server configurations. The quad-core model comes with a 3.2GHz Intel Xeon processor, 6GB of RAM, ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB GDDR5 and 1TB hard drive. The 12-core model comes with two 2.4GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon processors, 12GB of RAM, ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB GDDR5 and 1TB hard drive. The server model comes with a 3.2GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processor, 8GB of RAM, ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB GDDR5 and two 1TB hard drives.

The quad-core model is priced at $2,499, the 12-core model at $3,799 and the server model at $2,999. The first two come with OS X Lion whereas the server model comes with OS X Lion Server.

As you can see, the update isn’t dramatic. The CPUs in question aren’t particularly new and the GPUs have not been upgraded at all. There are also no Thunderbolt ports as well, nor any USB 3.0 ports.

Another sad bit of news is that Apple has quietly axed the 17-inch MacBook Pro model. What used to be the flagship notebook in Apple’s line-up has now been replaced with the new MacBook Pro with Retina display. It seems that Apple is now more interested in pleasing everyday users than hardcore professionals, the kind of people who would buy the Mac Pro or the 17-inch MacBook Pro.

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