Wow! What a mental roller-coaster the last few weeks have been.
From the moment the new Mac Pros were first introduced in early March, to yesterday afternoon when I finally placed my order, I've gone from one extreme to the other: 8-Core to 4-Core; 2.26 to 2.93 to 2.66 back to 2.93 again. Read the benchmarks. Read the reviews. Re-read the technical specs. Scan the forums.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Each day. Sometimes several times each day.
I don't recall ever experiencing this sort of angst in picking a new Mac before. I think the price-points Apple introduced with this update really screwed things up for me.
In the end, for me it came down to a matter of balancing power, speed, and price, with price being the major consideration. The price of the new 8-cores were beyond my means (and mostly irrelevant to my work-flow anyway unless and until the software catches up to the hardware). But I hated the limitations being placed on the new 4-cores.
So I decided to give a look to the 2008 models, and the chart below shows the result of my comparison between the 2008 8-core and the 2009 4-cores:
That pretty much sold me right there. Here's my blog post about it all.
My new 2.8 8-core Mac Pro should arrive next week. Now maybe I can stop fretting and get on with my work...
From the moment the new Mac Pros were first introduced in early March, to yesterday afternoon when I finally placed my order, I've gone from one extreme to the other: 8-Core to 4-Core; 2.26 to 2.93 to 2.66 back to 2.93 again. Read the benchmarks. Read the reviews. Re-read the technical specs. Scan the forums.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Each day. Sometimes several times each day.
I don't recall ever experiencing this sort of angst in picking a new Mac before. I think the price-points Apple introduced with this update really screwed things up for me.
In the end, for me it came down to a matter of balancing power, speed, and price, with price being the major consideration. The price of the new 8-cores were beyond my means (and mostly irrelevant to my work-flow anyway unless and until the software catches up to the hardware). But I hated the limitations being placed on the new 4-cores.
So I decided to give a look to the 2008 models, and the chart below shows the result of my comparison between the 2008 8-core and the 2009 4-cores:
That pretty much sold me right there. Here's my blog post about it all.
My new 2.8 8-core Mac Pro should arrive next week. Now maybe I can stop fretting and get on with my work...
