Apple first unveiled its Mac Pro earlier this summer, at WWDC in June. Now, six months later, the desktop computer is finally available for order online. Apple today opened up Mac Pro orders via its online store. Unfortunately, though the device is now on sale, your new computer won't arrive before the holidays are over. Tim Cook announced on Wednesday that his company would start accepting orders for the Mac Pro today, December 19. Right now, the website states orders won't ship until February 2014.
Earlier today, the order date was listed as December 30, and then January. So it looks like first day orders are pushing the ship date considerably. Assembled in the United States, the Mac Pro features a 3.7 GHz quad-core Xeon from Intel. This is teamed with two AMD FirePro D300 GPUs, 12 GB of 1866 MHz DDR3 RAM, 256 GB of PCIe flash storage (read/write speeds of 1.2 GBps/1 GBps) and up to six Thunderbolt 2 ports. Customers can configure their Mac Pro with as much as 64 GB of RAM and 1 TB of flash storage, so while pricing starts at $2,999, you can expect that baseline price to rise if you make changes to the specs.
One of the most notable things about the Mac Pro is the design, which is completely different to the last generation of Mac Pro desktops. For this generation, Cupertino has opted for a sleek, cylindrical design with a cooling solution called the 'thermal core.' This thermal core is a three-sided heatsink that cools the entire length of each PCB, and a single large fan pulls the hot air up and out.
Follow Jane McEntegart @JaneMcEntegart. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.