I am not talking about what best suits Apple: all my points are about what best suits me for video, value, performance. Call me selfish, but when I am spending over 3k, I should care about what I am getting.
There is a distinct different between being overly self centered , myopic , and selfish and wanting to get value for you money. Not every vendor has to offer something for you. What should be looking for is vendors who are aligned with the value propositions you are looking for. ideally should be looking for win/win. Where vendors offers what they want to offer and you get what you want to get.
Apple offers balanced, well made workstations. They also don't lowball on price. They don't do "loss leader" boxes where one product line is suppose to subsidize another. Their value prop is also that they make enough money so can be reasonably confident will be around 4-6 years from now.
If don't care about balance or well made then should be looking elsewhere.
I'm not making excuses for Apple. I'm point out why Apple should not make bonehead offerings. Such as ....
The facts are that the 6 core 3.33Ghz can nip the heals of the 8 core 2.93 current gen and surpass it if it is overclocked to 4ghz.
Why should Apple hold back from offering a 2010 version of the same tech that the 6 core 3.33GHz is offered at? There is no rational justification for that. If going to offer a 3680 follow on then why not offer a 5650 dual one. The 5650 will beat both the 2.93 current gen
and the overclocked version. ... without overclocking (which is likely to kill off the usable lifetime of the machine). If gets faster results has high value then they have delivered higher value offering with the next generation.
In short, to measure whether next gen is better value prop than last you compare the exact same product offerings between generation. A "high" SP to a next gen "high" SP . A "low" DP to a next gen "low" DP. Basing it on apples to oranges and cross product line comparisons mainly just servers to obfuscate the comparisons.
Most of these "Apple should build discount mini tower" tangents are primarily about creating apples to oranges comparisons and then ifso-factso tada Apple has to create a mini tower. They totally blow off the real core issues to try to make a point through misdirection and hope to loose enough folks along the with to form a mob.
When compare apples to apples ( similar workstations which have similar quality, parts, and balanced performance characteristics ) there isn't this huge gulf in prices (differences yes but not huge typically). So it isn't about Apple charging waaaaaaay more than other vendors their size it is really about Apple sticking to a set of offerings that doesn't cover everybody possible and their distant 3rd cousin.
This is America, where the consumer has free choice and is able to voice their opinion and dissatisfaction.
You can voice it I'm just puzzled why think going to accomplish anything. Most of these apples-to-oranges tangents often boil down in the end to "apple should shot itself in the foot so that I save more money" after strip off the misdirections. It is not a win/win situation. It is a "I should win so they should loose" one.
Apple knows how to compete when they want to.
Again Apple is competing. Not against everyone else's whole entire line up. They select certain products offerings and then compete against those
equivalent subsets. They are also not following a strategy where set up anymore cannibalization against their own products than is required.
It tends to work quite well since they are doing better than almost all of their competitors.
The Macintosh has never had anything near 10% worldwide market-share, so why should they compete? It makes it frustrating though.
Frustrating for whom? Apple is sitting on a giant stack of money. The folks who are looking for matches between what they want and Apple's design approaches are happy. The frustrated folks are those who are telling Apple to change their business policies and have no justification as to why that would be beneficial in a win/win context.
High Ghz is always felt in the day-to-day tasks as well as navigation within an app.
....
More GHz for faster menu selections ? Seriously? A better storage I/O set up would likely to just as good of a job in most cases. There is no "torque" required so that kind of lightweight stuff.
Chasing after highest GHz typically has folks blowing off other attributes to engage in the GHz war. They blow off memory size (not speed size so that can get as much as possible off the storage) and storage i/o ( again so can get things as quickly as possible off the storage ). It is a balance of all three that counts.
.... and processing of daily work with Photoshop. 2 cores is about it for usage in CS 5 (you will see more cores working, but they juggle the data around. ALSO, when a core waits for RAM, it will show a peak performance [I did not know that] even though it is not processing any data!!).
No joke on the high number of noops. That is exactly why SMT/Hyperthreading works. Folks are on average
under utilizing the core(s). So more GHz just means on average just
increasing the under utilization.
And when the other cores don't juggle the data around ....... the 2 main ones would achieve as much throughput.
There is no non trivial algorithm that is 100% parallel 100% of the time.
Who wants to bet that Apple doesn't even ship it with 4GB??
I would. More likely the default will be 6GB (SP) and 12GB(DP). 4GB/8GB (with 1 GB DIMMs) is misguided because would be killing off benefits the 3 memory controllers give you. Only really want to fill that 4th slot when backed into that situation.
a. the price of 2GB DIMMs has fallen so huge price increase to go with them instead of the 1GB ones. Second, it demonstrates a value increase between old/new.
If keep 1GB DIMMs more whining about how should have dropped price.
b. It is more balanced since newer Xeons have bigger L3s makes sense to keep the L3/memory average balance the same.
c. Have done it on MBPs. Now coming standard with 4GB.
The primary blocker on going from 3GB to 6GB would be them bumping the hard drive default size up far enough (640GB -> 1TB) that the year-over-year price drop savings was totally used up on that or got partially eaten up by Intel's price hikes. That isn't the best choice for balance though.
The only reason to keep 1GB on the update is that know most folks were going to run off and replace them anyway so just ship with smallest, cheapest set. That's not an "added value prop" position though.
There should be enough "extra" space on the SP daughtercard for Apple to drop a version with 6 slots perhaps this time. Use the space were the other processor and 4 slots are in the alternative version. However, can see how they may stick with the somewhat copy and replicate Package + 4 on both and max reuse on this update.
FCP needs to catch up now with PPro CS5 - Adobe taps into the GPU like never before while Apple laid off a lot of people from the FCP division. I'm also thinking about switching to the CS 5 master suite (since I use CS for design and layout anyway).
Switching software because better fit. Imagine that.
stop beating loyal customers over the head with hyped up prices, delayed new products and the promotion of toys!
Loyal customer... What Apple owes you something on your next system because you previously bought one?
I understand the never owned folks but if have bought a Mac Pro the value prop now is about the same as it has been since they firmed up the boundaries between product lines.
