Picked up a used Mac Pro ('09 version, 2x2.26 ghz) a few months back. Thought I'd chime in with a short, impromptu review.
I have never had a modular Mac before this. My first Mac that I actually owned was a Macintosh LC 575, which was, in a way, the first "iMac." It had built-in ethernet, monitor, CD-ROM drive, 13" Trinitron with 640x480 resolution, and a 33 MHz 68040 processor. There was also an expansion slot but I never used it. The whole logic board could slide out the back on a tray for the user to expand RAM, and the hard drive was similarly easy to upgrade. After a decade with the original Mac, upgraded to a Plus in '89, the move from the original Mac to the LC 575 was ginormous: it was a move from black-and-white to color, from a dog-slow 68000 chip to a speedy (for the time) '040. It was killer, but of course, soon outdated as PowerPC dawned and time quickly passed it by.
We all have memories, I think, of expensive computers that became worthless wastes of space in a couple of short years. The mid-to-late '90s and early '00s littered the planet with these toxic, more-or-less useless hulks.
But I have a friend whose G4 Quicksilver 733 MHz machine still runs Tiger snappier, and faster, than my 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro runs Leopard. Really. And it just got me thinking... I was going to spend $1200 on a maxed-out Drobo anyway, so I just spent $2700 and bought a used Mac Pro, then threw in $300 of hard drives (4TB!).
So far I would have to say that the Mac Pro was worth it, easily. It makes you realize that laptops are pretty good, so everyone kind of dinks along with a laptop as their main machine. And that's fine for 99% of people. But I think the general view that you have to be encoding video or rendering 3D all the time to deserve a Mac Pro is just wrong.
I used to think that a PC homebrew system, or possibly "hackintosh," would be the way to go. But then I started looking at cases. Even the very best PC cases I could find, which were $300 or more, do not hold a candle to the Mac Pro case. Furthermore, there is just nothing like AppleCare, and honestly, I'd by AppleCare for my own health insurance if it was an option -- that's how good the service is. It's insanely good.
Furthermore I also realized that the up-front cost of a Mac Pro was high, but so was the resale value. I tell this to camera customers a lot: sure, getting a $2500 lens sounds crazy. But you can sell it later on for a decent amount, used. So really, it's not as much as it sounds like.
Now, used home-built PCs? Crappy resale value.
After actually using the Mac Pro for awhile, being able to have 20 apps open simultaneously, being able to leave it always on, always available as a file server for my critical documents, always backing up my key stuff, easily expandable, I can tell ya, now when I look at laptop-only people, I kind of just think, "That used to be me." It's hard to explain, but it's like the feeling of having graduated from a point-and-shoot camera, to an SLR. You don't get rid of the point-and-shoot... it's not an either-or decision. You just expand.
If you're on the borderline, just trust me on this. It's by far worth it. One word: PCI. Expandable GPU. Trust me.
I have never had a modular Mac before this. My first Mac that I actually owned was a Macintosh LC 575, which was, in a way, the first "iMac." It had built-in ethernet, monitor, CD-ROM drive, 13" Trinitron with 640x480 resolution, and a 33 MHz 68040 processor. There was also an expansion slot but I never used it. The whole logic board could slide out the back on a tray for the user to expand RAM, and the hard drive was similarly easy to upgrade. After a decade with the original Mac, upgraded to a Plus in '89, the move from the original Mac to the LC 575 was ginormous: it was a move from black-and-white to color, from a dog-slow 68000 chip to a speedy (for the time) '040. It was killer, but of course, soon outdated as PowerPC dawned and time quickly passed it by.
We all have memories, I think, of expensive computers that became worthless wastes of space in a couple of short years. The mid-to-late '90s and early '00s littered the planet with these toxic, more-or-less useless hulks.
But I have a friend whose G4 Quicksilver 733 MHz machine still runs Tiger snappier, and faster, than my 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro runs Leopard. Really. And it just got me thinking... I was going to spend $1200 on a maxed-out Drobo anyway, so I just spent $2700 and bought a used Mac Pro, then threw in $300 of hard drives (4TB!).
So far I would have to say that the Mac Pro was worth it, easily. It makes you realize that laptops are pretty good, so everyone kind of dinks along with a laptop as their main machine. And that's fine for 99% of people. But I think the general view that you have to be encoding video or rendering 3D all the time to deserve a Mac Pro is just wrong.
I used to think that a PC homebrew system, or possibly "hackintosh," would be the way to go. But then I started looking at cases. Even the very best PC cases I could find, which were $300 or more, do not hold a candle to the Mac Pro case. Furthermore, there is just nothing like AppleCare, and honestly, I'd by AppleCare for my own health insurance if it was an option -- that's how good the service is. It's insanely good.
Furthermore I also realized that the up-front cost of a Mac Pro was high, but so was the resale value. I tell this to camera customers a lot: sure, getting a $2500 lens sounds crazy. But you can sell it later on for a decent amount, used. So really, it's not as much as it sounds like.
Now, used home-built PCs? Crappy resale value.
After actually using the Mac Pro for awhile, being able to have 20 apps open simultaneously, being able to leave it always on, always available as a file server for my critical documents, always backing up my key stuff, easily expandable, I can tell ya, now when I look at laptop-only people, I kind of just think, "That used to be me." It's hard to explain, but it's like the feeling of having graduated from a point-and-shoot camera, to an SLR. You don't get rid of the point-and-shoot... it's not an either-or decision. You just expand.
If you're on the borderline, just trust me on this. It's by far worth it. One word: PCI. Expandable GPU. Trust me.
