The future may well be mobile, but desktop computing’s not quite dead yet and Apple has just given it more than a last huzzah in the first of its big announcements at a launch event in California tonight.

The 2013 Mac Pro is the first update to the external design of Apple’s premier desktop since the launch of the Power Mac G5 in 2003. Gone is the big grey aluminium chassis, and in is a jet black cylinder which is less than an eighth the size but somewhere in the region of a gazillion times more powerful.

In imperial measurements, it’s a pleasingly numerical 9.9inches high by 6.6inches in diameter, which sadly converts to 25.15cmx16.76cm in horrible, inelegant modern.

That doesn’t take away from the design, however, and Apple has found room inside for a ridiculously powerful workstation. There is, however, one drawback to the delicate design: there’s only room for a single SSD hard drive, and prices escalate fast because they’re a unique design that uses the PCI Express interface rather than the industry standard SATA. The justification is that PCI-E gives Apple more than double the bandwidth to move data around from drive to system memory – but the base model will cost $2 999 in the US (Rand prices not confirmed yet) and have a puny 256GB drive inside. To fit the largest available drive, a terabyte, you’ll pay a frankly stupid $3 999.

Yes, you can have external storage connected over Thunderbolt, but the lack of space and upgradeability may well tone down the initial response to the unusual design.

(Apple fans have always enjoyed a suppository-like approach to pricing, does this new machine mean they have the hardware to match? – Ed)

Here’s the specs: apologies for the rip and tear from a press release, but there’s a load more announcements coming up in a mo…

• Processor – A choice of Intel Xeon E5 (Ivy bridge EP) server processors does duty in the Mac Pro with options of either 4, 6, 8 or 12 cores Core monster
• Memory – up to 64Gb of ECC 1866MHz RAM in 4 channels
• GPU  – Graphics will be handled by up to a dual 6GB AMD FirePro W9000 GPU which AMD describes as the most powerful workstation graphics card ever created.
• Storage – Similar to the recently released Haswell powered MacBook Airs, the Mac Pro will not be using a standard SATA port for its storage but rather using a faster PCI Express based drive that will offer data transfer speeds of up to 1250MB/s compared to the roughly 500 – 700MB/s that SATA can achieve. Storage will be up to 1TB and will be user accessible and upgradeable through Thunderbolt add ons as well.
• Wired expansion – The new Mac Pro has several wired expansion options
  • 6 X Thunderbolt 2 ports allows up to 36 devices (6 per port) to be connected to the Mac Pro with transfer speeds of up to 20Gb/s or twice as fast as the original Thunderbolt ports. The Thunderbolt 2 ports also support 4k video transmission and the Mac Pro can support up to three 4k monitors at once
  • 4 X USB 3
  • 2 X Gigabit Ethernet
  • An HDMI 1.4 port which also supports 4k resolutions
• Wireless connectivity will be handled by a combination of Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11ac WiFi which made its debut in the Macbook Air and the new Apple Airports earlier in the year.