Heh, I can't understand anyone voting yes in this poll. We know very little about it including the most important element in almost everyones purchase decisions: Price. If you don't know how much it is haw can you say you would buy one? What it's a million dollars? Still worth it then? How about only $10K ?
See what I mean?
I like the system. It's an engineering feat! Less than 10 inches high and under 7 inches in diameter, wow! In fact it's so engineered that they may have engineered themselves right out of a market. Whether or not the submarket it creates is big enough to support it is one question. It looks like they cut a lot of costs with propriety and we'll have to see if those cost benefits outweigh an initially smaller market. Of course if the market grows to significant size then with all these cost-cutting moves Apple will have pulled off another commercial success.
Notice I said "
commercial success" for we won't know how theses tiny tubes stand up against the competition for a bit yet. And this is the second most critical factor is making a purchase decision. So it's like, how could anyone say yes yet?
Oh well, whatever... It looks cool to me! I wonder if they will come is color anodized candy colors like the old iMacs?
Excellent points IMHO.
Both cost and performance (ROI) are figured into corporate (or I should say proper) purchase decisions by any business entity (from an independent to Fortune 100).
I suspect these things will be a bit on the expensive side, just for the initial tube. But keep in mind, that there will be a good chance that additional items would be needed (besides monitor/s), to get a suitable working solution. Storage in particular, which will add costs above and beyond the base model (or whatever CPU/GPU combinations available to chose from, or even SSD capacity, as now they really have users over a barrel).
Consider if someone might need a Promise Pegasus for storage, those start at $999. So it can get ugly fast, and worse, even the Pegasus units are a serious compromise IMHO, as they use consumer grade drives rather than enterprise grade to save on costs (not nearly as reliable this way, nor are these drives designed for the abuse RAID configurations generate to begin with).
As per performance, it remains to be seen. Currently, there are no 12 core processors in an LGA2011 package (current max is 8 cores due to 32nm process). Will need a die shrink to push it to 12 cores on a single die, which means Ivy Bridge Xeons, which haven't even been announced yet, let alone being manufactured (
E5 series; note that out of all the P/N's listed, only 2 are currently shipping; max core count = 8 physical cores).
So sure, it may have fast processors available, but once outside of those, any expansion is achieved over TB ports, which even at TB gen. 2.0, is still attached to the system at 8x PCIe lanes, which are switched to all of the TB chips. Latency + switch latency will degenerate the performance vs. the ability to use a dedicated 8x lane PCIe slot.
Lots of compromise here, that will both increase costs to the user (not necessarily Apple, as I suspect this will generate an even higher gross margin for them if the sales numbers meet or exceed their targets), and decrease the performance vs. a more traditional design (box with PCIe slots & HDD bays).
