In all the excitement this week, I forgot to blather on (maybe shill) for the new MacPro that was announced this Monday. I don’t work on Mondays at Apple so my energies are spent on anything but my job. When I did get in on Tuesday, I read up on it through the training materials, sorry, no spoilers or super secrets about it here. Think of the training modules I have access to as being deeper, more informative marketing information. It’s not meant as a dig, it’s just a fact since training really can’t predict the future of what someone in my position should know; the PowerBook 5300 is a famous example because everybody involved at Apple completely missed the mark on that product.
Last year, when Jobs announced the transition from PowerPC to Intel-based processors, my stomach fell. For 14 years Apple pushed, pushed and pushed the hell out of the merits of the PowerPC. Now would come all the backpedaling and revisionism along with all the PC geeks yelling “we told you so.” Thankfully, the migration starting with the iMac has been pretty impressive and the MacPro cinched it for me. I figured it would really wouldn’t differ too much from the PowerMac G5, it would be another version of the 8100, a transitional model that wouldn’t be much of an improvement until the second generation. How glad I was to be wrong with this. The new MacPro comes with four processors as a standard, can be expanded to 16 GBs of RAM, it stores four internal SATA hard drives, there’s ports galore on the front and back, even the bottom-end video card can drive the 30” Cinema Display (must have in the near future). Its price tag of $2500 seems intimidating since it lacks an entry-level Good Configuration around $2000 as the G5 did. The $2500 is really closer to being the Better (midrange) and you can strip it down in the CTO options to bring it down to a cheaper price. Again, $2500? Seems overpriced for an Apple-branded Intel box. I would immediately agree if it were compared to an el cheapo, craptacular Dell. If Dell built a tower with the same specifications, it would be $2800. I guess I will have to buy a copy of Windows XP to go with Boot Camp to get my new MacPro to be comparable, only with the price. The ease-of-use is still immeasurably cheaper.