AidenShaw said:
A Dell Precision Workstation 490 (mini-tower) with 1 GiB 1333MHz FB-DIMM (dual channel 667 MHz), 250 GB SATA drive, DVD-RW and 128 MiB Quadro NVS card is:
- $2300 - 1.60 GHz
- $2800 - 2.33 GHz
- $4200 - 3.00 GHz
- $8200 - 3.00 GHz w/ 16 GiB FB-DIMM
- $34,400 - 3.00 GHz w/ 32 GiB FB-DIMM
Add about $500 for a 256 MiB Quadro FX graphics card.
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&oc=MLB1725&s=biz
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In contrast a PW 380 with a single socket dual-core is about $1900 for the top speed processor (not Conroe yet, but the prices should be similar).
That makes a Conroe about $350/GHz, and the 1.6 Woody about $360/GHz (5.32 GHz vs 6.4 GHz) at theoretical perfect scaling. In real life, most applications would be quite a bit faster on the Conroe.
So, will Apple sell a really slow Woody at a price that's much higher than a much faster Conroe?
I think we're more likely to see the high end Mac Pro centered around the E6700 than a Woodcrest, or even the Core 2 Duo Extreme Edition (X8600). The EE is obviously more for gaming which is an area that Apple doesn't necessarily need to have in order to succeed. That's not a knock on Apple machines not playing games, or Apple (or their customers) not wanting games, but I'm just saying...they'd pay a premium (at street prices, over 2x more) for an EE cpu which could (for all intents and purposes) be equally useful as a normal C2D E6700 cpu if gaming isn't in the equation. Now, yes, everyone knows (or should know by now) that Conroe isn't meant to be put into a dual (physical) cpu environment, whereas Woodcrest is, but in all reality - they could get away without going "Quad anything" in the top of the line Mac Pro and they'd probably fare just as well.
Me personally - I think anything Quad-based is still years away from being not only technologically sound, but also useful. I think the Quad G5 was more of a "ha! we did it! 4 cpus in a computer!" thing, but who knows. I do know that most software companies are still trying to grasp the idea of a single physical cpu with 2 cores, so doubling that is probably making their heads spin and not doing much else. AFAIK nothing is optimized for Quad (anything) yet.
mdntcallr said:
Hah! i have a powerbook, there are alot of things they can improve at apple:
1- Blu-Ray Drive So we can read and write HD, with dvd+/-R burning capability.
(if you think this is far fetched, Sony has already released a laptop with this)
And I guarantee you that it ups the cost of the machine at least $500 (which is seriously a lowballed guess; I'd say more likely it's around $650). Last I heard, BluRay players would retail around $1000 for a desktop model. Sorry, but I don't think that BluRay is even worth having at this point in time. A year from now - possibly. Besides, I think we're going to see a lack of support with both BluRay and HD-DVD because it's a split format and vendors won't know what to support because they won't want to alienate the owners who have "the other one". (ie they release a BluRay disc, well what do the HD-DVD owners do?)
Sony's known for proprietary formats (see also:
Betamax, Memory Stick, UMD) and all of their proprietary formats a) are not widely accepted and b) are usually phased out in favor of "the concensus' choice". Don't put too much stock in BluRay just yet.
mdntcallr said:
5- the fastest available laptop graphics chips. the current ones are a bit slower than the best ones on the market. so cmon apple.
I'd like to see higher end gpus, because it could help sway/attact some of the PC game companies into going dual-platform (and simultaneously releasing a game on both Mac and PC). But I can see the argument on the other side of the fence, which is that - you could be giving people a piece of hardware that isn't all that utilized, therefore it goes wasted and then you have people complaining about higher prices and unnecessary hardware. Catch-22.
mdntcallr said:
9- cheaper market priced additional ram for the computer. so i dont have to buy ram elsewhere and not have it covered by apple warranty
Computer manufacturers ALWAYS mark up RAM a good 50% above street prices; sorry, I don't think we'll ever see this change. Corsair ValueSelect works for me.

Just remember - sure, Apple may not cover that RAM under warranty, but depending upon what type of RAM you buy - most of the reputable companies these days (like Corsair) have lifetime warranties on their RAM. The way I look at it is - a warranty is a warranty.
