Fully Loaded Mac Pro Ravages Your Wallet for $9,600, Ships in February

You could toss a small fortune into Apple's trash bin-shaped workstation

For those of you who like to keep abreast of what's happening on the other side of the pond, Apple's cylindrical Mac Prosystems are now available to order, though don't bother shopping for one unless you're ready to drop some serious cash. Window shopping won't cost you a dime -- hopefully we didn't just give Apple any ideas -- but to bring one of these workstations home, you'll need to wave around at least three large.

The $2,999 configuration includes a 3.7GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor, 12GB of DDR3-1866 ECC memory, dual AMD FirePro D300 graphics cards, and a 256GB PCI-E based solid state drive. Apple provides amenities in the form of a built-in speaker, HDMI 1.4 output, four USB 3.0 ports, half a dozen Thunderbolt 2 ports, dual GbE LAN ports, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and OS X Mavericks.

Also available is a 6-core configuration starting at $3,999, though we decided to go wild and ramp up all the available core options. Our grand total came to $9,599 for a 2.7GHz 12-core Intel Xeon E5 processor, 64GB of RAM, 1TB PCI-E based SSD, and dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs. Accessories and software options could potentially add several thousand more dollars to the tally.

We're not picking on Apple here -- this is some serious hardware, and the Mac Pro is already proving popular. No matter what the configuration, ship dates have already slipped to February. That's a long wait when you're dropping several grand.