The ceiling has just been raised at the top end of the Mac line in terms of raw processing power. Although we knew the 8-core Mac Pro was imminent, in true Apple fashion its launch was anything but predictable. Fireworks and a press conference? Hardly - the upgrade just quietly appeared on Apple's online store.

Unlike the few other 8-core workstations already on the market, the new Mac Pro configuration is the cheapest and only one currently available with twin 3.0GHz quad-core chips. Other machines that can be bought with 8-cores, such as Dell's Precision 690, only work with the option of twin 2.66GHz quad-cores.

If you go to Dell's website and configure an equally matched machine (Dell Precision 690 with twin 2.66GHz quad-core processors, 4GB RAM, equivalent graphics card, hard drive and extras), then the Mac Pro comes in £1,150 cheaper.

This is based on the Mac Pro's basic configuration with 4GB RAM at £449 instead of 1GB, bringing it to a total of £3,108. This lower price is still beyond the means of most of us, but certainly puts paid to the myth that Macs carry some kind of mysterious design premium in their pricing.

Aside from the power bump, the only other change is an expansion of the hard drive capacity. The new configuration will allow for four 750GB SATA drives, giving you a possible total of 3TB onboard capacity, up from 2TB.

Replacing these drives, as with replacing other components inside the Mac Pro tower, is all very easy. The same goes for slotting in more RAM sticks. The more time we spent with our head inside the Mac Pro chassis, the more in awe of it we become.

It's a beautiful piece of engineering, all easy to access and tinker with thanks to such joys as tool-less installation of PCI graphics cards and screw-less hard drive sleds. Anyone could change around the components.

Same again

The tower is the same design as before and contains the same impressive basic specification. Twin optical drive bays share the same SATA bus, although there are two unused SATA couplings for the bays, too, presumably for HD DVD and Blue-ray drives, which, as yet, do not come as an option with the Mac Pro.