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Apple Introduces New Mac Pro with Nehalem Xeon Processors
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They did, the Xeon 3500 is the i7. They just significantly raised the margins on the Mac Pros at the same time.
Not underpriced, Apple just charged the same margins as the iMac. Everybody else makes their money by charging insane margins at the high end. Apple seems to have raised
Yeah, the very vocal group whose only requirement is that it have an Apple logo. Affordability and performance are of little concern to them. For those of us who live in reality, including the professionals, the severity of these price increases may be the difference between whether a Mac or PC is bought. There is a breaking line and Apple might have just did a FTL jump over it.
Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris will all offer their sincerest congratulations to Apple for finally making it to the party.
These new machines are a ripoff period, compared to what you got with the previous models the new Mac Pros replaced. $200 buys a ton more performance of a octo 2.8 penryn vs the new nehalem quad 2.66Ghz if your app can deal with eight threads (wooo handbrake!).
I'm beginning to wonder if Apple is charging a premium. Intel isn't even supposed to officially launch the Xeon nehalem chips until the end of March. Maybe we see a price adjustment downwards after that and Apple sees how much less Dell, HP, etc are offering their comparable workstations for. Or we all ridicule Apple for being $1,000 over a comparable machine from Dell.
Hopefully 10.5.7 allows people to build hackintosh i7s at home and you can have one cheap.
Apple really screwed over Mac Pro buyers on a budget.
Last generation Mac Pro $2299 bought you a 2.8 GHz quad-core system. It's E5462 CPU that costs $797 .
Now, the cheapest Mac Pro you can buy is $2499. Its W3520 CPU costs $284.
Way to go Apple. In the middle of an economic crisis you use cheaper parts and charge customers more. That'll work for sure.
Last generation Mac Pro $2299 bought you a 2.8 GHz quad-core system. It's E5462 CPU that costs $797 .
Now, the cheapest Mac Pro you can buy is $2499. Its W3520 CPU costs $284.
Way to go Apple. In the middle of an economic crisis you use cheaper parts and charge customers more. That'll work for sure.
2.8 vs. 2.26
Can someone tell me if the 2.26GHz octo from this year is faster than last year's 2.8 octo processor? I checked the performance tests, but they are for the crazy expensive high end 2.93GHz processor. I want to know how much faster this low-end Nehalem processor is compared to last year's 2.8.
Thanks guys.
Can someone tell me if the 2.26GHz octo from this year is faster than last year's 2.8 octo processor? I checked the performance tests, but they are for the crazy expensive high end 2.93GHz processor. I want to know how much faster this low-end Nehalem processor is compared to last year's 2.8.
Thanks guys.
Maybe they also didn't get the 3.2 GHz for this reason.
Hopefully that'll happen, although I think we may end up waiting for Westmere.
Yes, I completely agree with you there. I don't even fart at Apple's general direction. Most complainers are die-hard Mac evangelistas as far as I have noticed. It bothers them because they can't really upgrade their toys for cheap or preach for others as effectively about "macinbliss". Add to pot upcoming Win7 that has gathered rave previews and apple-fanboys have hard times ahead regarding their "status" or free-time advertising.
Also about the 2.27 GHz octo, that kinda puts a spanner in my theory that a line can't have lower-clocked quads (8-core) in with higher-clocked duals (4-core). Interesting.
Depends on workload. For example, x264 encoding is 30-40% faster on a nehalem than on a penryn (or so says the author). So 40% faster on a 2.26 is
equivalent to a 3.1GHz penryn. But that program has been optimized for nehalem, your bog standard app probably hasn't been. It might only see a 10-15% boost.
I'm going to buy one
I've been visiting this site for quite a few years, mostly as a silent observer. It's a great site for an Apple fan. A funny thing is that it's always, "Wait for the update. Wait for the new one." Then, when the thing comes out it's, "WTF, this thing sucks." It's hard to believe anyone here would ever buy a Mac again with all the waiting and subsequent product bashing.
It's not my intent to put anyone down. Just a blanket observation. No, I don't always agree with Apples decisions and sometimes they are bad ones, no doubt.
I'm sure I'm in the minority here but I'll be purchasing one of the new Pro's as my many year old G5 is starting to get those nice Kernel panics. Yes, it's expensive but there are definitely worse things to waste money on. $3300 spread over 3 or 4 years (which is how long I plan to use it before upgrading) isn't too bad. Certainly, that's not everyones situation. $1000/yr to have a very fast capable Mac isn't so bad, IMO. And that doesn't take into account the resale value..... which isn't too great when your resale machine is having Kernal panics
I've been visiting this site for quite a few years, mostly as a silent observer. It's a great site for an Apple fan. A funny thing is that it's always, "Wait for the update. Wait for the new one." Then, when the thing comes out it's, "WTF, this thing sucks." It's hard to believe anyone here would ever buy a Mac again with all the waiting and subsequent product bashing.
It's not my intent to put anyone down. Just a blanket observation. No, I don't always agree with Apples decisions and sometimes they are bad ones, no doubt.
I'm sure I'm in the minority here but I'll be purchasing one of the new Pro's as my many year old G5 is starting to get those nice Kernel panics. Yes, it's expensive but there are definitely worse things to waste money on. $3300 spread over 3 or 4 years (which is how long I plan to use it before upgrading) isn't too bad. Certainly, that's not everyones situation. $1000/yr to have a very fast capable Mac isn't so bad, IMO. And that doesn't take into account the resale value..... which isn't too great when your resale machine is having Kernal panics
If you consider the PowerMac, then no, that is false.
The fact of that matter is, buying a PowerMac used to be CHEAPER than just the logic board and cases of the new Mac Pros.
The mid-range PowerMac used to be as much as (or LESS) than the bastardized entry level Mac Pro now is.
It's one thing if people complain when it's always been this way, but it used to be a lot cheaper to buy a decent Mac tower.
Not to be an jerk, but "Mac Pro buyers on a budget" is a bit of an oxymoron. The Mac Pro is marketed to a completely different crowd than the iMac crowd. The majority of purchasers could care less about price. When Apple is sitting on $20+ billion in cash reserves they couldn't care less about the recession.
ah whoops. I was looking at the old images, thinking they'd been updated when they hadn't. (this was about 30 mins after the new MP came out).
Dude, I remember when RAM was $60/MB and more.
1994 - 32 MB RAM for a PowerMac 7100/66 was $2000+
one Mini Display port on the graphics card along with DVI which looks hella weird. also means that you cant use two LED Displays with a Mac Pro
And you cant use the new NVidia card in the previous macpro because of the following:
Requires Mac Pro (Early 2009 with 1066MHz DDR3 memory) with PCI Express 2.0 slot
Google it yourself. I would have, but you're being kind of rude, and I don't have the time for it.
EDIT
Here's an SAP test.
http://it.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=532
That's a pretty serious disconnect from reality, you have there. A base model ca. 2006 quad-core Mac Pro (which was $2500, not $3000) would have from 2-3x the performance of a brand-new Mini, and by virtue of having twice the core count, it will benefit more from "Snow Leopard".
I've been visiting this site for quite a few years, mostly as a silent observer. It's a great site for an Apple fan. A funny thing is that it's always, "Wait for the update. Wait for the new one." Then, when the thing comes out it's, "WTF, this thing sucks." It's hard to believe anyone here would ever buy a Mac again with all the waiting and subsequent product bashing.
It's not my intent to put anyone down. Just a blanket observation. No, I don't always agree with Apples decisions and sometimes they are bad ones, no doubt.
I'm sure I'm in the minority here but I'll be purchasing one of the new Pro's as my many year old G5 is starting to get those nice Kernel panics. Yes, it's expensive but there are definitely worse things to waste money on. $3300 spread over 3 or 4 years (which is how long I plan to use it before upgrading) isn't too bad. Certainly, that's not everyones situation. $1000/yr to have a very fast capable Mac isn't so bad, IMO. And that doesn't take into account the resale value..... which isn't too great when your resale machine is having Kernal panics
You took the words out of my mouth. We will be getting 2, to replace an iMac G5 and a Quad G5. The cost spread over the next 3 years is negligible when I consider that 2 of these might cost me AUD$15,000 and they will produce in excess of AUD$600,000 in income. I still think that is a f@#king great return on my investment.
nehalem 2.26 will crush harpertown 2.8 in all workstation/server benchmarks.
Only benchmarks core 2 are as fast as core i7 are gaming and those are irrelevant for xeon as harpertown used fbdimm.
No, you are talking about the ability of the Kernel to use multi-processor hardware. But "Grand Central" is not that. What Grand Central does is provide an easy way for applications software developer to take advantage of multiple cores. This is much different.
In the past (with Linux, BSD, Solaris and Windows) we were using things like threads libraries. Grand central is a littel different than that and moves a little of the "smarts" into the system.
Grand Central depends on the features that you say were in Linux, Solaris and Windows it does not replace them
Um, what?
OS X has had support for multiple cores/processors for YEARS. Grand Central just provides a nice framework that allows developers to easily use multiple cores (as opposed to having to write multithreaded applications from scratch).http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115202
This processor is indeed cheap!
I have to say previously Mac Pro seem to be worth the money when they first came out. This new model is absolutely a rip off.