Apple Mac Pro Coming in December for $2,999

Apple announced today that its new Mac Pro will be available in December, starting at $2,999.

The new Mac Pro will be one-eighth the size of the old Mac Pro. There are six Thunderbolt 2 ports, Intel Xeon CPUs, dual AMD graphics processors, and support for 4K displays. The entire top of the Mac Pro is a handle for easy portability, and it will be assembled in the U.S.

"The new Mac Pro is our vision for the future of the pro desktop, everything about it has been reimagined and there has never been anything like it," Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, said in a statement. "The new Mac Pro packs up to 12-core Xeon CPUs, dual FirePro GPUs, ultra-fast ECC memory, new PCIe flash storage, Thunderbolt 2 expandability and more into a radical new design that is one-eighth the size of the previous generation Mac Pro."

Starting at $2,999, the new Mac Pro will sport a 3.7GHz quad-core Xeon, 12GB of DRAM, dual FirePro D300, 2GB of VRAM each, and a 256GB SSD.

But buyers can opt for a quad, 6, 8, or 12-core Xeon processors running at Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, up to 30MB L3 cache, and 40 lanes of PCI Express gen 3.

The Mac Pro sports a "unified thermal core" that allows for shared thermal capacity across all processors. The device's fan draws in air efficiently, making it as quiet as the Mac mini, Apple said.

"The result is a pro desktop with unprecedented performance packed into a design that is just 9.9-inches tall and one-eighth the volume of the previous Mac Pro," the company said.

The Mac Pro will be pre-installed with Apple's new OS X Mavericks, which will be available to everyone else as a free upgrade.

Apple first showed off the Mac Pro at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). "This is a machine unlike anything we've ever made both inside and out" Schiller said at the time. There's a "new unified thermal core," which "even sounds cool," he quipped.

Apple today also boosted its MacBook Pro lineup with Intel's 4th-gen Haswell processors, as well as a few cosmetic updates.

For more, check out our hands on with the Mac Pro from today in the video below, as well as Apple's New Mac Pro: What You Need to Know. Meanwhile, for all things Apple, be sure to peruse PCMag's live blog from today's event.

Editor's Note: This story was updated at 3:15 p.m. ET.