Just when you thought you had it good, a dual processor-powered eight-cored, 16GB DDR2 RAMed up behemoth comes and knocks over your little parade by encoding a 2TB video in less time than it took you to read this sentence. And it ONLY costs $18,400.00. Sheesh kebab! Supply and demand just got thrown down the toilet! Rolling in with some pretty impressive specs, the Apple Mac Pro can be configured with up to two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors, 16GB of low-latency RAM (8 modules weighing in at 2GB a piece), a thousand-dollar Mac Pro RAID Card for optimized storage performance, not one, not two, not three, but FOUR 750GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA HDDs running at 3Gb/s EACH.

As if that wasn’t enough, presuming you’re going flat out and getting yourself two 30″ Apple Cinema HD Displays to bask in your super-speedy glory, you’ll need a pretty hefty graphics rig to handle the pressure. Good job the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512MB is on hand (Stereo 3D 2 x dual-link DVI). Think of it as the 8800-Ultra’s big brother-in-law’s body-builder’s trainer. Holy cow… Now we’re talking! When you consider that you can fit in two 16x SuperDrives (how I love their automated fancy eject) and both Bluetooth 2.0+EDR AND AirPort Extreme support within the chassis of this beauty, the genius of Apple’s so-called “designers” (really another way of saying astro-phyiscists moulding our products to perfection) really starts to shine. Quad-channel 4Gb Fibre Channel PCI Express card, an Apple USB Modem to boot and an Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple wireless Mighty Mouse (WOOHOO!) included.

That’s one powerful web browsing system, so I figure to make use of it’s talents, we could either run Protein Folding applications, simulate a nuclear explosion or use some of the software I specifically included in the order menu, to be preinstalled. Mac OS X Leopard (What else!?!?!? Vista?!?!?) - iWork ‘08 (I’ve been testing it - a nice MS-Office competitor!) - Aperture 1.5 (Schaweeeet!) and Logic Express, for when the likes of open-source Audacity just don’t cut the chase. If you’ve got some spare moolah flying around, don’t hesitate to send it my way. (Joke, BTW…)

…but seriously. If anyone’s got a spare $18.4 grand you were going to give to some noble cause, consider us little guys. Hit the Apple Store to check out my configuration. Inspired by none other than our very own Nate Whitehill’s single most uber Apple rig EVER.

(Again, a joke. Don’t take everything I say so seriously and stop flaming my inbox. I just changed e-mail addresses.)