It's been two years since Apple's Mac Pro has received an update, but today's the day: as rumored, the 40-pound desktop, lovingly known as the "cheese grater," will be updated with fresher components than the pair of 6-core, 2.93GHz Intel Xeon X5670 processors it's been kicking around since 2010. Unfortunately, it's not much of an upgrade: you can simply get a pair of six-core 3.06GHz Intel Xeon X5675 processors rather than the 2.93GHz ones we just mentioned. The base model will start at $2,499 for a single quad-core Intel Xeon W3565 processor at 3.2GHz, with an optional upgrade to a six-core chip, or you can spend $3,799 to get a dual-processor configuration with a pair of the Westmere-EP based 2.4GHz E5645 chips, and upgrade to the aforementioned X5675 for an additional $2,400.

Everything else stays the same, it seems: you can get up to 64GB of RAM, 2TB worth of solid state drives (but only running over SATA 3Gb/s), AMD Radeon HD 5770 and 5870 graphics cards (which we thought were out of production), 802.11n networking, Bluetooth 2.1, Gigabit Ethernet, optical digital audio in and out, a combo DVD writer, and a host of FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 ports (no USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt). It's probably still a powerful machine, but if you were hoping Apple's workstation would see the latest and greatest technologies, we're afraid you're out of luck for now.