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Mac Pro for Daily Use
- Thread starter colonelradec
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I registered for the sole purpose of chiming in on this.
As an avid Mac user from the Mac Classic (1990) till today, I will warn against purchasing an iMac.
1. Mine is the 2008 Fall release, and I bought the extended warranty, went through two graphics cards, and three monitor screens, all from daily use playing video games, surfing the web, and doing homework.
A. My original screen had two stuck pixels (one red one green), and the graphics card made a humming noise when the iMac was tilted forward (the fan on the card was not balanced at the angle).
B. My second screen had even more stuck pixels, and text would burn into it (temporarily, for say a few hours) so that after reading a text document, you could see the outline of the text while watching a movie (flashing the screen black/white did not help).
C. My third screen, the moment they installed it, had two lines of dark pixels (stripes one pixel wide from top to bottom) on the far right side of the screen. The Genius told me to not worry about it and that this sometimes happens and goes away on its own - well mine didn't, and I won't take it back to gamble on where my dead/stuck pixels will be on my next screen.
2. When anything goes wrong on an iMac, you have a rather large, heavy, and fragile chunk of equipment to lug to the Apple store.
3. The high gloss screen requires very careful placement of lights wherever you use it.
4. Because the guts of the computer are in the monitor, and the monitor is near your face, you can hear the graphics card / fan a lot more than you would if you had a desktop unit farther away.
5. I'd wait for the next Mac / Mac Pro offering to be unveiled before buying a Mac Pro system (maybe they will have a smaller less powerful model, but no matter what they put out, it will blow everything being sold now out of the water), if I were in a hurry I'd buy either a fully decked out MacMini and look into an external video card, or buy a MacbookPro and use it with an external monitor from Dell (because of the hook up options / pixel guarantee).
TLDR; if you have troubles with an iMac it is an incredible hassle compared to having troubles with a MacPro, MacMini, or a MacBook Pro.
I used to own several iMacs but because of the screen issues I've had and no possibility to upgrade the darn thing at all (graphics, internal storage) I've decided to purchase a Mac Pro.
All I do with my machine is internet browsing, mail, Photoshop and sometimes I play a game. A Mac Pro is overkill for me, but the 4 drive bays, the ability to upgrade the graphics card and the ability of choosing my own display makes this the perfect machine for me.
If you like the Mac Pro, go for it. It's your money, you don't have to justify the purchase to anyone in my opinion.
All I do with my machine is internet browsing, mail, Photoshop and sometimes I play a game. A Mac Pro is overkill for me, but the 4 drive bays, the ability to upgrade the graphics card and the ability of choosing my own display makes this the perfect machine for me.
If you like the Mac Pro, go for it. It's your money, you don't have to justify the purchase to anyone in my opinion.
I would not hold my breath for that!
So far even the long-announced external Raid-enclosures are only slowly trickling into the market (and at absurdly high prices imo). Plus you'll have a much higher latency with external boxes - might not be an issue with storage, but could very well be an issue with graphics (if you really need more "punch" than originally available in your machine you'll probably also have higher requirements in that area).
Not to mention that Thunderbolt is a new technology, which involves all kinds of potential bugs and shortcomings that have to be ironed out over the first months.
If Thunderbolt will be adopted by the PC world (which probably won't happen before 2012 due to not being available earlier in Intel's common chipsets), it may eventually become an accepted standard and then you'll also see creative solutions like external boxes for graphic cards at an affordable price that are really available for purchase.
Until then i would not consider this a viable alternative for a purchase decision.
Good point. Besides, if money is an issue, a Mac Pro in good condition would do the trick. For your use, stick to a quad (Nehalem). The biprocs are WAY overspecced.
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Good point. Besides, if money is an issue, a used or second hand Mac Pro in good condition would do the trick. For your use, stick to a quad (Nehalem). The biprocs are WAY overspecced.
Actually lack of volume is a reason they could ship out systems early. Coupled with Intel validating some of the boards in even earlier versions also helped. Frankly, many other vendors probably don't ship early because don't have enough systems to sell on general market (all the systems pushed into the early adopter / early evaluation stream .) Apple seems to like creating lines at their stores for hard to get products. There won't be a physical Mac Pro line but Apple will string people out if there is some free "buzz" advertising in it.
If a vendor is going to ship a high number of Xeon's they can't ship early because Intel won't dribble enough volume to them in the "pre-release" shipments to cover what they need to sell.
The 2010 systems arrived late for two reasons both of which are highly evident. First, Intel didn't really follow up with the 36xx series to replace the 3500 one. At "release" there were plenty of 56xx models to choose from but only one 36xx one. Doing "half" of a Mac Pro line up upgrade would be very un-Apple thing to do. Eventually, they "made do" with speed bumped 3500's in the single package upgrade. ( as expected there was a fair amount of moaning and groaning over that too. )
Second, in early-mid 2010 Apple probably knew the E5's would be late. So they could either take a huge upgrade gap delay ( March-April '10-> Oct-November '11 ) in a new model ( during which all the "Mac Pro's are doomed , blah blah blah" chatter would reign supreme for 3-4 months. ) or they could take a March-April -> July-August hit in 2010 delay and a July-August -> Oct-November hit in 2011. ) delay. Still going to get some of that "doom and gloom" chatter but it won't get as much traction over a extended period of time. There is an old commercial that goes "You can pay me now , or you can pay me later". The shift of the Xeon release schedule from Spring to Fall was coming no matter what. All of the vendors had to choose how to deal with it. Either the "denial and sprinkle diversionary minor upgrades out during the long gap" approach or do a gradual shift. Apple did the gradual shift.
There will likely be some other things ( case rework to better fit some XServe duties) that probably got weaved into the extended delay, but the 6+ month shift in Xeon volume release shipments is the larger driver.
Intel CEO's basically said the partners get some say in the release date.
"... “We have not gone public on the launch date because our server customers are very conservative about putting the dates out. ..."
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Inte...2011-Romley-Platform-Is-On-Track-212763.shtml
That means the partners are getting a fair number of chips early so they can dribble these out to field test sites to gather enough info to give Intel the thumbs up. Apple would have had access to more than few E5's many weeks before the release date.... just like all of the other larger system vendors.
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