Virtualization would work better if the VM hypervisor ran against the metal (Much like VMWare ESX). It is too bad Apple doesn't offer that.
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Apple Introduces New Mac Pro with Nehalem Xeon Processors
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I am rather confused by the Mac Pro "bumps". Bottom line is that we need some independent realistic benchmarks done of the whole range. If performance is significantly better then I'm willing to suck up a little "exchange rate price fluctuation".
Trouble is, I'm not sure whether the new quad actually deserves the "Pro" moniker. Strikes me that the quad and its limited expandability should simply be called the "Mac".
Prior to yesterday morning, you could buy a very decent albeit one-year-old spec 2.8 octo with less than £2000. Today, that money just buys a crippled quad. Now if Macworld et al comes back with figures that suggest it isn't a step backwards then I'm happy.
And for the money, I would hope the new octo matches or exceeds the performance of yesterday morning's 3.0.
As a semi pro musician and producer, I had hoped to be getting a Mac Pro in the next few months to take over as my main DAW from a seriously overworked MBP. I shall be scouring the Refurb store instead I feel. Ah well.
Trouble is, I'm not sure whether the new quad actually deserves the "Pro" moniker. Strikes me that the quad and its limited expandability should simply be called the "Mac".
Prior to yesterday morning, you could buy a very decent albeit one-year-old spec 2.8 octo with less than £2000. Today, that money just buys a crippled quad. Now if Macworld et al comes back with figures that suggest it isn't a step backwards then I'm happy.
And for the money, I would hope the new octo matches or exceeds the performance of yesterday morning's 3.0.
As a semi pro musician and producer, I had hoped to be getting a Mac Pro in the next few months to take over as my main DAW from a seriously overworked MBP. I shall be scouring the Refurb store instead I feel. Ah well.
I've said this before, but either Apple is selling at drastically margins than they were before or they were getting serious discounts from intel before and no longer are. The CPU costs in the quad 2.66ghz and octo 2.26ghz machines are roughly half of their predecessors, the ECC DDR3 DIMMs are much cheaper than FB-DIMMs, and the prices I can for for the dual socket x58 chipset seem to be roughly the same as the old 5400 professional chipset. Either the prices Apple gets charged by the suppliers went way up or they're really sticking it to the Pros.
The good news is, the new iMacs are flippin sweet
Only if you're in the family consumer realm. Been there, am suffering through that, never going to waste money on an iMac again.
You could always go the EFIX route and get the same quad core i7 based computer for about half the price, something I'm seriously considering, they've got good reports of MOTU based systems running quite sweetly, it helps that I have some friends who are PC gaming geeks, so for a price of a meal and some booze they'd do the build.
Will wait for benchmarks, or hope for nice refurb prices. But with the half price hackintosh I could also splash out on a Powercore X8 and maybe a duende for just a bit extra
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No matter what happens with the mac, as long as the iPhone farts people will be happy
So in the previous quad, there was a CPU socket open and you could just pop in a second? Wouldn't additional cooling be required, or was it the same for both systems?
At this point it's tempting to buy an old quad and just pop in a second CPU (and maybe upgrade the first).
That too. But it's either on the supplier side or mega greed on Apple's part.
If that's the case, we should be seeing price drops in a month or two.
Where do you guys think the Mac Pro line will be by late August/early September? I ask because I'm looking at possibly buying one for college this fall.
It's very easy to convince mac users of why they like to use macs over windows and linux, but for Pros it's also about the software, so where are the updated Pro apps, where's Blu Ray authoring to go with DVD Studio, when's the next advance in Logic, or FCP, where's the 64bit adobe suite, oh wait that's only on Windows
Friends... Romans.... Countryman... lend me your ears.
We come here not to praise Apple, but to bury it.
Signed... Blu-ray and Glossy Screen.
The iMac is a consumer-orientated machine. That's why it's not called the iMac Pro.
They most likely won't change prices. That could be the reason for the early release. Maybe Intel charged more for the early release, and Apple decides to use this as an opportunity to not drop the prices after the chips are officially released, and so get more profits.
Most likely the same.
Friends... Romans.... Countryman... lend me your ears.
We come here not to praise Apple, but to bury it.
Signed... Blu-ray and Glossy Screen.
Ok, this is getting annoying. Really annoying. Blue-ray may be a nice thing to have, but it's by no means a requirement yet, and if you truly need a Blue-ray drive for data storage just buy an external one and quitcherbitchin already.
Glossy screen? Yeah I agree, those suck. But please, quit harping on about Blue-ray. The majority still doesn't need it yet.
More correctly, they can offer to sell overpriced computers. To what degree they actually sell is in the hands of consumers.
Not in the quad, it's a xeon 3500 which is identical to an i7 except for ECC ram support.
Or maybe I can afford it but I'm not stupid enough to get ripped off this much. And I was perfectly happy to buy an 8 core machine at $2700, if a $500 price difference is meaningless to you, then you have more money than brains. Man would you quit your sycophantic fanboy sucking up to apple.
In this case, comparing the quad MP is a valid comparison since the consumer dells use a cpu that is identical with the exception of ECC ram support. Is that really going to make a visible difference to the user?
If you don't consider the XPS with i7 a "professionnal grade workstation", then by that definition I wouldn't consider the MP quad one either.
So have people found good deals on the previous generation octos?
I would consider the lack of blu ray a major thing for film makers. On a well equipped mac you can edit, color correct, do the visual FX, do the soundtrack. Do everything that a film maker needs, then you can create a nice DVD with snazzy menus et-al. But if you want to author a HD blu ray disc you have no choice but to boot into windows.
Now for consumers the lack of blu ray isn't major IMO, I don't really care for the format, but there must be over 25 million blu ray players in use world wide (including the PS3 and PCs).
So whereas a couple of years ago the mac was a one stop shop for film, that is no longer true, which seems like a backwards step.
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No matter what happens with the mac, as long as the iPhone farts people will be happy
I would say it's Apple's 'Mega Greed'.
I have always been buying Apple's flagship machines since 2005...
2 x PowerMac and 2 x Mac Pros so far....
In fact I have never skipped a revision and have always bought a new Power Mac or Mac Pro whenever a new one is introduced... and always top of the line CTO machine...
but the 2009's Mac Pro is making me think twice... and that's basically the cost... not that I cannot afford it... but I have a feeling that I am being really silly paying that much for workstation... while Apple laughs its way to the bank of course...
£2500 to £3000 for the top Mac Pro sounds reasonable and I wouldn't mind a bit of Apple Tax... but £5500 for the top end Mac Pro is down right ridiculous... I could get a new city car for that money...
and we aren't exactly in the middle of a booming economy either...
Maybe Apple's isn't serious about shifting more Mac Pros... all they care about are MacBooks / iMac and iPhone now (just look at their retail stores)... and where is Blu-Ray anyway? That would have been a little consolation.
I foresee that those who buy top of the range Mac Pros now are those who aren't spending his own money, but rather those in the corporate world who have massive budget to burn and wouldn't give a hoot about "value for money".
I understand that currency fluctuations etc. etc., and higher cost for these new chips from Intel... but it cannot be that ridiculously priced, right?
I'm sure these machines will be impressive in terms of performance, but it has reached a price point which is insanely hard to justify...
This is after all, a computer... and it doesn't cook my 3 meals or wash my laundry. And in terms of computing, how many Apps would take full advantage of the horse power? I doubt that Leopard making a full use of my 2008 8-core 3.2Ghz with 16GB RAM either.
I think I would simply buy the new graphics card and pop that into my 2008 Mac Pro.
Nope, I still don't buy it. ECC memory is a fact of life in the professionnal world and no one that considers a machine using ECC memory is going to price a XPS. They're going for the Precision line, or in HP's case, the xw6600 line. This is the Mac Pro's competition.
You might think the Xeon 3500 line is just a rebadged I7 processor, but obviously, vendors and buyers don't. Most people that want to make that comparison probably wouldn't even consider a Precision T5400 or a xw6600 for their workstations, because those are "overpriced" too.
The problem is people on here seem to think the Mac Pro is exactly what the PowerMac G3, G4 etc.. were, a mid-range desktop. I think Apple is trying to move away from that market, because in the end, it's a vocal minority that still care about it and it just wouldn't be profitable for Apple to keep selling to these people.
The Mac Pro is so obviously being pushed to compete with the professionnal level workstations, you'd have to be blind at this point not to see it.
why i'm bitter
i think i'm bitter cause i'm priced out of the machine that i'd like to get, which is probably the 2.66x8 or the 2.93x8. I would be using the Mac Pro to replace my G5, which I use for photos (aperture) and some video (FCE) but I am not pulling in a steady income from that (yet), so it's harder for me to afford an extra 2-3k.
I always assumed that 2500-3000 would be the price range for most pro machines, which the 1000-2000 being the range for consumers. That's why the 4700-5900 is kind of a sticker shock for me.
so in the end, i wish i could afford it, but I can't.
i think i'm bitter cause i'm priced out of the machine that i'd like to get, which is probably the 2.66x8 or the 2.93x8. I would be using the Mac Pro to replace my G5, which I use for photos (aperture) and some video (FCE) but I am not pulling in a steady income from that (yet), so it's harder for me to afford an extra 2-3k.
I always assumed that 2500-3000 would be the price range for most pro machines, which the 1000-2000 being the range for consumers. That's why the 4700-5900 is kind of a sticker shock for me.
so in the end, i wish i could afford it, but I can't.
The Gainestown (Xeon 5500) chips ARE higher priced than equivalent GHz Harpertowns (and Core i7). The difference isn't more than a few hundred dollars though. But the single processor Mac Pros use cheaper chips (Xeon 3500) that are more inline with Core i7 pricing.
Especially the $2799~$2999 price range, you could have gotten a 8-core system with Harpertown but you only get a 4-core system with Nehalem. Nehalem's architecture improvements do allow 4 Nehalem cores to get somewhat close to 8 Harpertowns depending on the benchmark.
I call BS. The only difference between the i7 and the 3500 xeon is support for ECC ram. Specifically what difference does that give in performance.
If you really think the difference is "really big" then prove it with a benchmark, otherwise you are just blowing smoke.
Just looked on the Refurb store here in the UK and:
For £2,500 you get a 2*3.2Ghz with 2g Ram, Nvidia 8800GT and one 500G HDD.
For £3,000 you get a new 2*2.26Ghz Nehalem, 12G Ram, ATI 4870 and 2* 640G HDDs.
The way I look at it is, the clock speeds might be significantly down, but hopefully the Nehalem architecture will in some way compensate for that (obviously it can't compensate across the board). Buying the new Mac Pro at least means you have the potential to upgrade the CPUs in 2-3 years time when the prices have dropped in order to get an extra year or two's longevity out of the system. Buying a refurb however cuts you out of an upgrade path because of the new chipset. It looks to me like £500 more up front gets you less raw power, but might be a better investment over the long (3-5 years) term if you're planning on upgrading rather than replacing in future.
Please poke holes in that theory- I need to buy a Mac because of software lock-ins so the Mac vs Windoze pricing argument is entertaining but ultimately pointless for me- I'd be more interested in a new Mac vs old Mac argument on the basis of future-proofing, not just what you could have bought a week ago vs what you can buy now...
You clearly have no idea what a workstation is, nor what it's used for.
These are workstations:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/e...19-307907-296721-3432827-3432828-3751527.html
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=1658157
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/precn_t7400?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd
The only disappointment I have with the new Mac Pro is the lack of Quadro cards. But even that doesn't matter that much for our 3D modeling.
You're clearly one of the people still bent out of shape about Apple not offering an xMac.
95% of the people in this thread are apparently blind, and have never purchased a workstation outside of Apple.
Or as you said, are desperate for an xMac, a mid-range desktop class machine using mostly consumer grade hardware at a consumer grade price point.
Mac event on the 24th? I don't realistically think it'll happen, but if it did it would clear up the strategic issue- keeping iMacs C2Duo and bumping Pros up to Nehalem leaves a quad-core sized mid market gap for an xMac, and what else is there to announce on the 24th? (if indeed the 24th actually happens)
No, I know it'll never happen, but one can dream, can't one?
Wouldn't that make sense to a lot of prospective users, even at a healthy Apple markup it would be nice. But Apple making sense with certain parts of their customer base doesn't add up.
In their view you either want last years notebook components with a mirror for a screen at a pretty premium as a desktop, or an (arguably) over priced beast of a workstation.
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No matter what happens with the mac, as long as the iPhone farts people will be happy