I'm about to buy a Mac Pro and there's a few reasons I need it over my existing MBP (2.5Ghz C2D 2008 model). About 9 months ago I started my own company doing software development/consultancy for the electrical power industry and I'm at the point where my MBP is just struggling as a daily development machine:
1. Memory. For me this is more of an issue than anything, my MBP has a maximum limit of 4GB and when I've got Eclipse running then run another process to start processing large network models I'm hitting the 4GB limit pretty quick, especially with 64-bit JVM. Add in a database, Mail, a few browser windows, multiple VMs and the machine just grinds to a halt. I'm probably going to start with 32GB in a Mac Pro and look at increasing that to 64GB in the future just so I can start simulating multiple systems to test integration. Which brings me on to...
2. Virtual machines. A lot of my work involves system-integration and I want to have multiple VMs running with different OS configurations to simulate and test how the software copes with multiple clients etc. For this lots of CPUs and plenty of memory will help and also give me a desktop with similar hardware to the servers the software will run on.
3. Meeting minimum requirements. I've got a document in front of me at the moment for a client's application I need to interface with. The recommended configuration for a "small system" is: 6 core Xeon CPU, 24GB memory, 8x 120GB HDD in RAID 0+1 and 2x Gigabit ethernet. If you move this up to a large system it's 12 core Xeon, 32GB RAM etc. I won't even get into the discussion about why this is their minimum spec, but I need to meet that so that if/when I find issues with performance etc. they can't claim it's because I'm running it on an inferior machine.
4. Displays. The laptop's 1440x900 screen just doesn't cut it for development and while I can add an external monitor, ideally I want two, matching 27" displays which I just can't add to the laptop. Will also help my posture...
None of this requires a Mac of course, but I love OS X and if I can do all of this on a Mac, why the hell would I buy a Windows machine?
Of course, I do spend some time travelling so while my current intentions are to put an SSD in the MBP (Applecare is up in March) I suspect what will actually happen is that after using the Mac Pro all day the MBP will just seem to slow and I'll end up buying a new one of them when they're refreshed...
