By Graham K. Rogers

Many sites are reporting that the new Mac Pro that looks like a tube, but has some interesting innovations inside, is to be available as from tomorrow: 19 December.

The primary source for this is a press release from Apple that puts the price at $2,999. That, at least is the starting price. With two models and a lot of desirable options if you are a professional (the target market group), the price can soon reach quite high levels.

Although this is slated for a Thursday release, the US site still shows this as "Coming in December" as does the Apple online store for Thailand where prices start at 99,900 baht for the model with Quad-Core 3.7 GHz Intel Xeon E5 processor, 12 GB GDDR5 ECC Memory and twin AMD FirePro D300 graphics processors.

The other model in the line starts at 132,900 baht and comes with the 3.5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5 processor, 16 GB RAM (1866 MHz, DDR3 ECC) and dual AMD FirePro D500 graphics processors.

Both the devices come with somewhat limited 256 GB of PCIe flash storage, although this can be configured at purchase to be up to 1 TB. Users may expect to make considerable use of the Thunderbolt connections for access to external storage.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.