New Mac Pro

[scooterscot]

But seriously.... GLUE ???

You'll probably should avoid flying on the Dreamliner... rumour has it you can still smell it curing upon boarding.

[minestrone]

Marco Arment was checking out the equivalent to a Mac Pro in PC form yesterday. When he used HP's website to configure a roughly equivalent machine, their price was around $2000 more than Apple's. Similar result on Dell's site. And, of course, the PCs were more the size, shape, and weight of a wheely bin than a wastepaper basket

Buying PCs online from these manufacturers and adding extras to get an exact spec is always a ridiculous cost
and that type of purchasing is always he same whether it be kitchens, cars etc etc.

At the time of purchasing my off the shelf Samsung ultra 9 last year it was thinner than anything mac produced, it was higher spec than what mac produced and it had the same build technology as what mac produced for lower cost.

I'm not saying that macs are bad, I'm saying that the way you gather information to back up your very public proclamations of loyalty is deeply flawed.

And on a personal note I think the mac front end looks fookin tulipe these days, daft sqeeezy window minimisations and those little dots and stuff. It's like listening to music from years ago and thinking "did people really like that stuff back then"

[doodab]

I like it. As a physical device, it looks pretty cool and seems to have some clever ideas in it, especially the way the cooling works. It certainly makes a change from the rectangular box form factor.

I expect we'll see some attempts at doing similar things in the conventional PC space soon enough. The HP Z800 was a bit different too, so perhaps expect something from them.

We could be looking at a renaissance of the super powerful desktop workstation, especially with the power these things can pack in now.

[Zero Liability]

When I next buy a computer it'll be from PCSpecialist, but then again I am after gaming PCs.

[d000hg]

The new Pro is clearly WAY overspecced for development work unless you are wanting to test an entire system in VMs with some chunky DBs going on... but in that scenario a Mac wouldn't be the obvious choice anyway; Windows or Linux desktop would be.

For music, well I'm sure things have moved on in terms of computational resources needed but even so this looks like utter overkill.

For video editing... I can see a professional making a good case for it but even so the top end models are a bit of an extravagance in my eyes.

This leaves us with:

3D modeling and animation. This stuff can bring any consumer hardware to its knees so those working in 3DS/Maya/ZBrush or doing CAD will doubtless be able to justify such a beast of a machine

Computational stuff, i.e. leaving the thing to run on tasks which take minutes or hours to complete. Whether that's render-farm stuff for animated movies or crunching data. However this use-case again doesn't quite fit with a typical Mac to me, you don't want to spend £3k on your main desktop and then not be able to use it because it's locked up for 2 hours at a time.

[MasterBlaster]

My dev computer (visual studio, SQL, vm's) is a custom built machine from clevo.
Super high performance and half the price of a Mac.


http://mysn.co.uk/xmg-p503

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...odid=LT-021-OE

[SpontaneousOrder]

I'd only consider a pc for playing games. Otherwise I'm used to using my mbp, and I really like the OS and using all of the different finger gestures on the track pad. There are the odd annoyances where apple have decided to make it difficult or impossible to change something that should be changeable.

IMac might be a good option. I was planning on getting a thunderbolt screen so that I can 'dock' my mbp though, and I'm guessing i can't hijack the screen from the IMac.

[doodab]

The new Pro is clearly WAY overspecced for development work unless you are wanting to test an entire system in VMs with some chunky DBs going on... but in that scenario a Mac wouldn't be the obvious choice anyway; Windows or Linux desktop would be.

For music, well I'm sure things have moved on in terms of computational resources needed but even so this looks like utter overkill.

For video editing... I can see a professional making a good case for it but even so the top end models are a bit of an extravagance in my eyes.

This leaves us with:

3D modeling and animation. This stuff can bring any consumer hardware to its knees so those working in 3DS/Maya/ZBrush or doing CAD will doubtless be able to justify such a beast of a machine

Computational stuff, i.e. leaving the thing to run on tasks which take minutes or hours to complete. Whether that's render-farm stuff for animated movies or crunching data. However this use-case again doesn't quite fit with a typical Mac to me, you don't want to spend £3k on your main desktop and then not be able to use it because it's locked up for 2 hours at a time.

Music I can see people liking it, it's overkill for basic recording and playback and most other things but for full on sample based simulation of an entire orchestra plus other stuff and effects it's not too far wide of the mark, though the graphics are probably overkill. It's always nice to have headroom as well, it'll get used eventually.

I ca see 'creatives' with a few of them wired up in clusters for rendering and stuff as well. Compared to other gpu based 'desktop supercomputers' or small clusters they might be quite cost effective, esp if thunderbolt can be used as the interconnect, and you can imagine that software packages enhanced to support that natively would provide a big ease of use boost considering what's involves in say a Linux cluster.

I have to say it's the first Mac that's tempted me since they went x86. I probably won't indulge though, too much invested in Windows software, although a lot is dual OS licensed.

[craig1]

I'd only consider a pc for playing games. Otherwise I'm used to using my mbp, and I really like the OS and using all of the different finger gestures on the track pad. There are the odd annoyances where apple have decided to make it difficult or impossible to change something that should be changeable.

IMac might be a good option. I was planning on getting a thunderbolt screen so that I can 'dock' my mbp though, and I'm guessing i can't hijack the screen from the IMac.

You don't need a PC for games if you've got any modern Macbook Pro or iMac, many games have Mac versions available and you can easily bootcamp the thing for other games. You could use VMs but only really for older games.

[darmstadt]

They're quite nice and I even contemplated one when buying a new work system but...they only have 16gb of memory which is just not enough for some of the software I have, so no go...