Apple did all what was expected at its 24th Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)-- no Apple TV or iWatch were announced, but the company did unveil a handful of PCs together with at times surprising refreshes on the OS X and iOS platforms.
It also got around to do a bit of gloating, as it is customary at such an event. CEO Tim Cook took the stage to give updates on the newest Berlin Apple Store (housed inside an admittedly gorgeous historic Kurfürstendamm theatre building), the state of the App Store (5 years old, 5 billion app downloads to date), iOS device sales (600 million) and MacBook growth (100% CAGR over the past 5 years in the US).
Stealing the show is the new Mac Pro-- a high-power desktop computer inside a sinister-looking black cylinder. Introduced via rumbling bass and James Bond intro-style brass, it looks like something out of Darth Vader's office and packs the latest Intel Xeon chip (up to 12-core), ECC memory, PCIe Flash storage and dual workstation GPUs as standard.
Apple claims graphics performance is 2.5x faster than the previous Mac Pro generation, with 7 teraflops of compute power pushing visuals to as many as three 4K displays.
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