Leaked Apple inventory list hints at new non-iOS hardware Sweat is pouring down fanbois' foreheads today: a leaked inventory list and a stock shortage have sparked rumours of a new Mac Pro emerging at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference. The Mac Pro desktop tower was last refreshed in August 2010, and the top-specced model is a 12-core £4,083 ($4,999) beast. Such muscle power is …
The sad thing is, the new models probably won't even be more expensive. They'll probably be indistinguishable but for incremental component improvements.
That being the case, and I can now see that El Reg has done basically everything it can to turn what would otherwise be a single sentence into an entire article. But when's the last time the release of a new computer really excited anybody?
I don't think she does. She's just pointing out that the biggest Apple is terribly overpriced and underpowered and that there's about $7billion of people out there willing to part with their monies for that.
Most people don't need an i(anything) but that's not what Apple does. They sell toys that make the middle class feel better about themselves. HP and Dell sell business tools in addition to toys so they've got somewhere to go.
Try going to DELL or HP's website and doing so. By the time you've reached a spec roughly equivalent to even the current ageing Mac Pro you'll have blown more than £4K
Oh, and there are many Pro software packages for the Mac that business and academia make good, practical use of. People who think otherwise are demonstrating their own ignorence.
"She's just pointing out that the biggest Apple is terribly overpriced and underpowered and that there's about $7billion of people out there willing to part with their monies for that."
Apple'3 Mac Pro ($4,999):
12 cores (2.66 GHz Xeon), 6 GB RAM, 1TB HD
HP's Z820 Workstation ( $4,999):
8 cores (2.0 GHz Xeon), 4 GB RAM, 500GB HD
Dell's T7500 Workstation ($5,524):
12 cores (2.66 GHz Xeon) , 6 GB RAM, 1 TB HD
(All sourced from the manufacturer's sites)
WHO'S "terribly overpriced and underpowered"?
The Dell defaulted to NVIDIA Quadro NVS 295 w/256 MB -- I didn't change that, the Mac has an ATI Radeon 5770 w/1 GB. Curiously, the HP was one of several on the page that has "not included" in the graphics card space.
The ATI has a faster graphics clock and more memory; the NVIDIA has faster shader and memory speeds and NVIDIA's apparently (anecdotal -- haven't dug deeply into it) shaky record with drivers for OS X.
I guess the HP would be about the same price as the Dell if it had a card then? When I purchased my octocore 3 years ago Apples entry level card was only a GT210 or something so I had to go for the 4870 option. You're right about the Nvidia drivers for Mac, they're hopeless. I've looked at a Quadro 4000 from time to time for CUDA and 10bit display (under Windows as OSX doesn't support 10bit (WTF Apple!)) but a colleague of mine has a Quadro 4800 and it isn't as good as my 4870 when using 3D apps under OSX so for the price I can't justify it.
Don't know why I was down-voted earlier but anyone who thinks any of the default cards Apple supply on the Mac Pros are workstation level is dreaming.
8 cores w/ 4GB RAM - every time i saw the spec, i was... what the ?
What's the designated task for that machine, it has the CPU power to run a good server but not the memory. The desktop is even more pitiful. No disk cache to speak.
>Apple is terribly overpriced and underpowered
Don, show us the body of evidence.
I just remember the Toms Hardware investigation into your tired claim... they attempted to build a PC using like-for-like components (ECC RAM etc) to the standards of a Mac Pro, and found that the base-line Mac was actually very fair value - though Apple would take the piss if you chose to upgrade storage and RAM from them. Remember that Toms are all about testing hardware empirically, mostly with a view to PC gaming but also general productivity, CAD and server workloads - hardly Apple Fanbois.
If you can support your assertion, please post link.
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A new shiny Mac Pro. Yeah too bad they are trying to obsolete the initial generation of Intel Mac Pro (bah $2500 for a computer means you should be able to afford to upgrade every few years in the cult of Jobs) so they can't upgrade to Mac OS X 10.8 (by not supporting some of the hardware like the graphics card). Luckily their will be 3rd party work arounds and or you might be able to get away with simply having to buy a newer more shiny graphics card that costs twice what the almost same model does on PCs. Apple is worse than Microsoft about arbitrary lame ways of forcing the user to upgrade (Microsoft at least usually only does it in software like with latest DirectX being only in new OS).
Whatever, shiny expensive things bought by those who can...
But the naming conventions, if they are real are just a bit wanky.
MD770X/A,BETTER,
MD771X/A,BEST,
MD772X/A,ULTIMATE,
BETTER, better than what - where's the prequal? And BEST? Presumably thats better than ULTIMATE. But if its ULTIMATE, then Shirley that's the best? Or have I just got stuck on one infinity loop.
... it would be bonkers for Apple, but it seems to be what Microsoft expect desktop PCs to have for WIndows 8 - a touchscreen that sits next to the keyboard and allows users to poke at Metro.
It would be bonkers to have the Mac Pro fitted with one because it is an under-the-desk machine.
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