The Mac Pro enclosure is even more of a technician's dream than any of Apple's desktop-pro computers, which have offered easy access to all major components since 1999. The Mac Pro sports four bays for hard drives, but these bays use modules similar to the Xserve that make installing drives incredibly simple because there is no need to deal with cables of any sort. Easy RAM and PCI card access also remains. And the new system sports dual optical drives, which can increase the ease and efficiency of CD or DVD duplication.

The Mac Pro will be available in a single standard configuration that includes two 2.66-GHz dual-core Xeon processors, 1GB of 667-MHz DDR2 RAM (which can be expanded up to a whopping 16GB -- more than any other desktop Mac in history), a single 250GB Serial ATA hard drive, 16x SuperDrive and four PCI Express slots (one of which is double-width for graphics cards). It includes an Nvidia 7300 GT graphics card with 256MB of GDDR SDRAM.

Build-to-order variations on the machine are virtually limitless with processor speeds ranging anywhere from 2GB to 3GB (all are dual-core Xeons in a dual-processor configuration). Up to four hard drives can be installed, providing up to 2TB of storage.

It goes without saying that this machine packs an incredible amount of power into a relatively small package and at a remarkable price point: $2,499 for the standard model. What's truly nice is that it can easily be compared component by component to competing PCs, showing the value of the machine.

Xserve