Apple evangelist Tim Bogel was in London today showing off the latest iMac skews and the new Mac Pro, which supersedes the old G5, and it has to be said that they look pretty good.

We will be reviewing them, so I won't rehearse all the specs here, except to say that the Mac Pro uses two of Intel's new dual-core Woodcrest-class Xeon server chips, giving a total of four cores, and should have Apple's many professional graphics users drooling.

Apple has always been good at introducing neat little tweaks to less glamorous parts of its systems - a good example is the MagSafe power connector on the MacBook. This allows you to trip over the power lead without bringing the laptop down with you, because it simply disconnects itself. It means that if you break your neck, at least you have your computer there in hospital to keep you company.

The Mac Pro has two or three little touches like this. It has four easily accessible pull-out drive trays (above left): to add a disk you pull one of these out (above right), bolt the drive to it, and slide it back. No fumbling about with wires and plugs, banging your knuckles on the power supply, inside a cramped system box.

The four PCI Express slots each has a captive thumbscrew that allows you to secure a card without recourse to a screwdriver - or the usual ritual of dropping the screw into the depths of the machine and spending the next ten minutes trying to dig it out.

And the 667 MHz DDR2 fully-buffered memory sits on its own pull-out daughterboard (right)for easy upgrading. You do get this type of innovation  in the PC world, of course, but it is often slow to take off because so many components are de facto standards. Apple can create its own standards, which has disadvantages, include the fact that you tend to get locked into its hardware and software. Bodel says Apple 'does not support in-the-field upgrading of processors' on its iMacs and he was no sure about the Mac Pro

Apple used its own form of heat sink on the Mac Pro memory and could not guarantee that all third-party memory modules would work with it. But he said generously: "Typically when you open up the system box you do not void your warranty."