The Mac we’ve all been waiting for, the one that completes the transition to Intel, was unveiled today at the WWDC 2006 Keynote by Steve Jobs himself. The Mac that was known as the PowerMac is now known as the Mac Pro, to go along with the MacBook Pro.

The Mac Pro is a must have for anyone who makes their living with Macs, because it is the fastest Mac to date. It features a “Dual Dual” setup, meaning two dual-core Xeon chips, for a total of four cores. It has dual 1.33 Ghz system bus and a 4 channel, 256-bit wide 667Mhz memory setup. This baby is fast.

Here’s a Mac Pro slightly disassembled. You can’t really see it clearly from here, but I understand that the system should be a bit quieter since there are only 4 fans instead of 9 in the previous PowerMac. I myself would have preferred a smaller case, but I guess the big case helps accommodate expansion.

Notice that there are four drive bays, all of which can be pulled out and filled in with a SATA drive. The entire thing is tool-free and cable free. This is a great design for the drives. I wonder if this will encourage people to do more software RAIDs.

Also notice that the memory comes out in trays. This looks like it will be easier to upgrade the memory which is quite handy. My only concern with the memory is the price for FB (Fully Buffered) ECC 667Mhz DDR memory. It seems to run from around $200-$300 right now for 1GB of memory. Also I think the memory has to be a matched pair.

I think everything is going to be smoking fast on the Mac Pro, from Xcode builds to audio and video editing. It starts at $2499 (or less if you are an ADC Select/Premier member) and is shipping now. I’ve been saving up for a new Mac and I think this is one that I’ll probably get.

I’d write more about WWDC Day One, but you really should go see the Keynote video first to see for yourself. There’ll be time enough to comment anyways since we can’t talk about the rest of the conference which is under NDA.

One more thing… My friend, Brian Cooke, is offering a 33% off WWDC Special on his handy app rooSwitch. I use it whenever I do testing, since it helps me test with a clean set of data and preferences, while keeping my normal set around. I asked him to make a banner, so here it is. If you’re a developer, go check it out!