Mac Pro goes on sale today, Apple announces prices

Update: Apple has now given us the shipping dates for the Mac Pro, and the bad news is that you might be waiting around a while. In the UK the dispatch date will be January for both standard and customised versions of the Pro. The same goes for Australia.

In the US, meanwhile, the tower will ship "by December 30", however if you choose to configure your model with some better specs, your order won't be sent out until January either.

Original story below...

It's taken its sweet time but Apple has announced that the new Mac Pro will be available to purchase from December 19.

The 9.9-inch tall Apple tower arrives in a unique cylindrical design - not to mention some seriously meaty specs.

The £2,499 ($2,999, AU$3,999) model will give you a 3.7GHz quad-core Xeon processor, dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of VRAM each, 12GB of memory and a 256GB flash storage.

But if that doesn't get your thermal core excited, you can opt for the 2.5GHz six-core Intel Xeon E5 processor which will also give you two AMD FirePro D500 GPUs, each with 3GB of VRAM. That will cost you £3,299 ($3,999, AU$5,299) though.

Towering inferno

If you're willing to splash out a little more, you can upgrade to an 8-core or 12-core processor, bump up the memory to 64GB or take up the flash storage to 1TB.

So if you fancy putting some money down for one, the new Mac Pro will be available to order at Apple's retail stores, online stores and retail partners from tomorrow.

That's just the first day of ordering, however - there's currently no confirmation as to when those cylinders will actually start shipping to buyers' hands.

• Want to know more? Then read our Mac Pro hands on review