What year did Apple first release the Mac Pro?

Apple first released the Mac Pro in 2006. The company formally announced the professional desktop workstation on August 7, 2006, at its Worldwide Developers Conference, and it began the Mac’s transition from PowerPC processors to Intel technology.

The original Mac Pro replaced the Power Mac G5 as Apple’s high-end desktop. Although it reused the Power Mac G5’s large aluminum tower enclosure, its internal architecture was substantially different. It used Intel Xeon processors and provided room for multiple hard drives, optical drives, memory modules, and PCI Express expansion cards.

The 2006 launch completed Apple’s migration to Intel-based Macs. Apple had announced the transition in 2005, and the Mac Pro was the last major Mac line to move away from PowerPC. Its standard configuration included two dual-core Xeon processors, 1 GB of memory, an Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT graphics card, and a 250 GB hard drive.

A frequent mix-up is 2007, which was the year of the first major Mac Pro update. Other later generations included the compact cylindrical model introduced in 2013 and the tower redesign released in 2019, but the product family began in 2006.