We just had a chance to look at the Mac Pro in a soothing hands-on area, featuring lots of stations that were demoing the kind of work that Apple expects pros will want to do. Starting at $5,999, the new Mac Pro has been long-awaited, and, lucky for pretty much everybody, Apple didn’t over-engineer the basic shape: it’s a rectangle, and you can put PCI cards in it.

Where Apple did apply its engineering chops is in all of the little details, like the complicated way that the grille on the front has some extra depth and texture instead of just being a grid of holes. The chassis is built around a stainless steel frame, and the feet on the bottom can be replaced with wheels. With a turn of a handle on the top, you can lift the entire body off the computer to get to its insides.

All of those details show Apple’s cleverness in design, but the previous Mac Pro was too clever by half, forcing Apple to admit it had designed itself into a “thermal corner.” There should be no such problem here, as there are three big fans and, based on what Apple said onstage, plenty of heat sinks for major components.

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On the component front, Apple is promising that you’ll be able to fit some seriously powerful parts in this machine — up to 1.5TB (that’s terabyte, with a T) of memory across its 12 slots, with up to a 28-core, 56-thread Intel Xeon processor and up to four GPUs using something the company’s calling an MPX Module. Those modules not only plug into the desktop’s primary PCIe slots, but they also get additional bandwidth and up to 500W of power from a new Thunderbolt backbone that Apple added to the motherboard.

The model Apple is showing off in its hands-on area isn’t overloaded with cards, as you can see above, but you can load it up yourself: there is a total of eight PCI Express slots. (Though Apple uses one of them for basic I/O, you could theoretically replace that one yourself if you want to.) But if you’re using MPX Modules, they can take up a lot of that real estate: a pair covers four full-sized PCIe slots, even the spaced out ones Apple’s using here.

As for what Apple expects users to do with this much power, the available demos highlight the usual suspects: film, music, and photo production and editing as well as 3D graphics. “Demo” is a bit of a misleading word in this case, as we weren’t actually allowed to touch the machines or run any kind of real-world tests. But we were able to see the new Mac Pro running software like Logic, Lightroom, and Final Cut Pro X. By all accounts, it seems like even the base version of the Mac Pro is among the most powerful creative production and editing machines Apple has ever concocted.

Here at WWDC 2019, the company set up a live professional photo shoot equipped with an iPad Pro to get live preview shots straight from the camera and editing on a MacBook Pro wired up to the new Pro Display XDR in portrait mode (using the $1,000 stand that you’ll have to buy separately). The workflow looked pretty flawless, showing off the Pro Display XDR’s HDR capabilities and high-nit brightness when it’s used as the foundation for RAW photo work like this.

The photography demo corner also had HDR retouching in Affinity Photo, HDR composites in Lightroom, and then a really stunning time-lapse produced in Final Cut Pro X. Granted, it’s not clear if professional photographers would ever lug around a Pro Display XDR for photoshoots. But Apple illustrated how integrated its new desktop powerhouse, the companion Pro Display XDR, and an iPad Pro can be if you’re willing to work the way Apple envisions, and the Mac Pro itself could be a dream workstation for the high-end professional photographer with the space and resources to set up a dual- or even triple-monitor setup at home.

Correction, 8:01 PM ET: The MPX Modules appear to cover four of Apple’s PCIe slots as a pair, not four each. You can see a picture of what that config looks like at Apple’s product page.