Presumably, that connector includes extra power pins, a Crossfire bus, and maybe another thing or two that’s Apple specific. The MPX module adds a second connector in-line with the standard PCIe connector, and there is room for two of these. Only, they don’t acutally seem to have a way to power them via the usual PCIe extra power cable. So in theory, you could plug in four GPU cards. The Mac Pro has four double-wide PCIe slots, presumably with 8 o 16 lanes each. Well, ok, they are… just don’t call it a PCI Express card. Nope… Apple’s not going to sell you a PCI Express card. You can tell that’s the punchline because that’s where we’re ending the article. The Apple Pro Stand goes on sale this fall, with a retail price of $999. While details are still forthcoming if this display will automatically change the display orientation in MacOS, this is something that has been possible for thirty years, the patent is absolutely expired, and anyone could build a dongle that switches between portrait and landscape mode automatically in relation to the direction of gravity.

The new Pro Display mount allows for something not many VESA mounts are designed for: The Pro Display XDR can rotate into either portrait or landscape mode. This is a magnetic display mount, a game-changing advance in monitor mounting technology. This connector is designed to attach to the back of the Pro Display XDR and locks the Pro Stand and display together. The new Pro Display XDR connects to the Pro Stand with a ‘puck-shaped magnetic connector’. Now this standard faces a challenger thanks to the brave designers at Apple. For the last two decades, this has been the standard for mounting monitors to stands. Larger sizes, with respectively larger thread sizes, are used for gigantic wall-mounted televisions. Look on the back of your monitor, and you’ll probably find a pattern of M4 threaded inserts laid out on a 75mm or 100mm square. The VESA mount, or more correctly, the VESA Mounting Interface Standard, was created in 1997 as a mounting standard for flat panel monitors and televisions. The big story isn’t the next generation of cheese-grater Macs, though: the new display, the Pro Display XDR, has killed the venerable VESA mount and we couldn’t be happier. This week, the new Mac Pro has been announced, and the specs are amazing: We finally can buy a professional, desktop Mac with half the storage of an iPhone. After the immense failure of the 2013-era Apple Pro trash can Mac, Apple has been hard at work at the next generation of workstation desktops.

Mac pro display xdr stand