One week prior to the beginning of MacWorld, the usual venue for Apple's January new product announcements, Apple has surprised Mac fans with a dramatically updated Mac Pro desktop.
The new machine features two quad-core Xeon processors running at up to 3.2 GHz, and room for four graphics cards for a "display wall or large-scale visualization," according to the Apple site. All the standard-equipment display cards for the Mac Pro now support dual displays and take advantage of PCI-X 2.0. The new Mac Pro carries a $2799 price tag.
Also updated is Apple's Xserve, which gets a choice of one or two 3.0 GHz quad-core Xeon processors. The Xserve starts at $2999.