Apple took the unusual step of announcing new hardware at the popular software developers conference today.

Apple ushered in a next-generation MacBook Pro, announced a firmer ship date for its Mountain Lion operating system, and gave the world its first glimpse at iOS 6 during an announcement-packed Worldwide Developers Conference keynote on Monday.

The MacBook Pro with Retina display runs on a 2.3GHz quad-core i7 processor with 8GB of RAM. It features an Nvidia GeForce Gt 650M graphics processor with 1GB of VRAM, 256GB of flash storage, and up to 16GB of 1600MHz RAM. The new model costs $2199. It is much slimmer and has USB3 and USB2 connections as well as Thunderbolt but no Firewire. Apple will be releasing Thunderbolt to FW800 and Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adaptors. Lets hope these work with Pro Tools and its hardware.

The Mac Pro announceent was missing from the 2 hour presentation bcecause the leaked new Mac Pro hasn’t been anounced. Instead there has been a small speed and RAM bump for the ageing Mac Pro machine range but no promised Thunderbolt connectivity.

Apple is now offering two standard configurations of the Mac Pro. The $2499 model features a 3.2GHz quad-core Xeon W3565 processor, which is capable of a speed of 3.46GHz using Turbo Boost. The processor also supports Hyper-Threading for up to eight virtual cores, and has 8MB of L3 cache. The $3799 model has two 2.4GHz six-core Xeon E5645 processors, with Turbo Boost performance up to 2.67GHz. The E5645 also has Hyper-Threading (24 virtual cores) and 12MB of L3 cache.

The $2499 Mac Pro has 6GB of 1066MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM, while the $3499 Mac Pro has 12GB of 1333MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM. Both Mac Pro models come with a 7200-rpm 1TB hard drive, with the three other hard drive bays open for customization. For video, the Mac Pro comes standard with a 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5770 PCI Express cards. The 5770 has two Mini DisplayPorts and a dual-link DVI port.