Apple's Mac Pro on sale tomorrow from £2,499

It's been compared to a rubbish bin owned by Darth Vader and a box of tissues as designed by Dieter Rams, but the Mac Pro is finally going on sale

New Mac Pro from WWDC 2013

Apple has announced the release date of its all-new Mac Pro, with prices for the quad-core version of the machine starting at $2,999 (£1,830).

The Mac Pro, which will be available to order from tomorrow (December 19), has undergone a dramatic redesign, departing from the original cuboid shape and moving to a black, smooth cylinder.

Machine from aluminium and weighing in at 5kg, the machine is 9.9-inches tall and occupies only one-eighth of the volume of the previous model.

Different versions of the Mac Pro will come with a 4-core, 6-core, 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon processor running at speeds of up to 3.9GHz.

With the two AMD Fire Pro GPUs, Apple claims that the machine can deliver “up to eight times” the graphics performance of the previous generation. There are also sequential read speeds “up to 10 times faster than conventional desktop hard drives” thanks to PCle-based flash storage.

In addition, Apple is offering ECC DDR3 to give the new Mac Pro up to 60GBps of memory bandwidth, and also six Thunderbolt 2 ports, each with up to 20GBps of bandwidth per device to support up to 36 high-performance peripherals, the firm claims.

All machines will be running the OS X Mavericks version 10.9.

Apple has announced that the quad-core version of the machine will start at $2,999 (£1,830), with the 6-core version starting at $3,999 (£2,440).