And I thought that this was targeted at the uber-geeks at Engadget who only think about the specs and lowest price and if it can play Crysis or GTA 4. [just acting like all the other trolls right there] I'm willing to bet that 75% of the people who moan about the bad specs of Macs don't have PCs of those specs.
Why would the pins fail anymore than any other pin connector setup that's only ever unplugged once in the lifetime of the machine? How often do you switch out your ram?
Say what you will about PC users not having computers of the same power, or how this is geared towards people who won't customize computers, that doesn't change the fact that custom hardware like this needlessly increases the complexity and cost of fixing anything. The tray system for the hard drives and such isn't bad, voodoo did something similar with their [now dead?] Omen PC, but the non-standard nature of the motherboard could very easily cause problems. This also screams of the late 80's/early 90's design of putting things like processors on add-in cards. last computer I saw that in was running Pentium III.
I think the chance of something going wrong when you reach your hand inside an old model is more likely than a pin being damaged from the motion of that horizontal sliding.
hum dude you can get the extended warranty which gives you free repairs in the ext 3 years so no it does not suck at all. Plus when I used to work at a fairly large IT department we used to service PC hardware ( gateway + dell ) about 5-10 times more often than we did Macs. And replacing parts on Macs was fairly simple then and even simpler now ( not talking about iMacs ).
People seriously like to "build" their computers still? Really? I hate to break it to you but a manufacturer putting millions of dollars into the testing and design of a system can do FAR more than someone matching specs off Newegg. When you can build parts that are meant to work with each other you end up with a far more impressive result (iMac), something that a system builder can never dream of doing.
Find me a mass installation of computers in a missions critical environment that aren't all Dell or some other major manufacturer. When you start dealing with the big boys, you'll get laughed out of the room if you suggest building your own PC.
That is called "mass production" items are tested together so they can be knocked out cheap in huge quantities.
A pro self build can easily trounce mass produced you obviously just don't know how and need HP/Apple/Dell engineers to do it instead and their eye is purely on profit.
@ utahnkid - I'm not talking about mission-critical environments, of course they'll all be running the same platform all across the board, and you must think i'm an idiot if you think i don't realize that the "big guys" can potentially build a more reliable product (although half their goal is to make the product as cheap to produce as possible). I work in these environments every day.
Perhaps this is just a difference of opinion, but i'm not someone who takes pride in owning the same thing as everyone else.... I want something that suits my own tastes, and I want granular control over the components that are inside it. Freedom of choice is important to me, and Apple denies PAYING CUSTOMERS that right more than many other manufacturers. Whether it's the components inside their machines or the applications they're running, i believe that everyone deserves full control over their own personal computing experience.
The computers in current commercial aircraft are installed in a rack system that uses connectors with similar pins. Those computers get removed and installed regularly for troubleshooting / maintenance. They work in far harsher conditions and they rarely fail, so why would a computer sitting in your study be any less reliable?
Even an overclocked 4GHz Quad core cannot come close to a Mac Pro with 8 Xeon cores chewing away at something. For professonals who need the incredible power of an 8 core Xeon workstation, there is really nothing out there better for the money than the Mac Pro.
Which brings me to MY challenge. Try building and equivalent Xeon workstation with the same processors and same features as the Mac Pro for less. It cant be done... I looked hard at my options when I was buying, and Apple is a good 1,500 dollars LESS than their competition! Even if you build one yourself!
Those Xeon quadcores in the Mac Pro are 1000 dollars EACH on newegg so 2,000 dollars just for the processors alone! Hmmm, these new Mac Pros are seeming like a deal now for a lot of people, I bet. At least for those who NEED this kind of power, anyway. For gamers or websurfers, this machine is silly. But for 3D, video, scientific applications, and anything else heavily multithreade... or for someone who runs quite a few programs at the same time, this machine is amazing.
This absolutely insane computing power is why I... as a PC user... bought a Mac Pro, and it has been the best PC I have ever owned, by far.
Dell's Precision (the T7400) puts a world of hurt on the Mac Pro. At least when it comes to the new mac pro, it doesn't offer any hard drives faster than 7,200 RPM. The Dell has Raid 0,1, or 5 15k SCSI drives. Regardless of processor speeds, especially on 8-core systems, the hard drive is the bottle neck. Also since the new Mac Pro currently lacks any 'Pro' version video card, like the Quadro line from Nvidia. Those are massive drawbacks on the Mac Pro compared to what else is out there.
BTW: New Mac Pro Two 2.93 quad Xeon (Nehalem) 8GB 1066 ram (DDR 3) 640gig 7200 RPM (Raid 5) GeForce G 120 512MB 3-year Applecare $7,348
It'd be interesting to see the performance between the two systems. The dell vastly outclasses the Mac Pro with hard drive and video card, but falls behind on RAM speed. The proc's may be comparable, but I have yet to see any benchmarks.
Yeah, but the Nehalem processors were not invented by Apple, and they are not exclusive to Apple... so anyone who builds or buys a system with the Nehalem processors in them will achieve the same performance. And you are right, the new Nehalem processors are supposed to be extremely fast, and much faster than the previous generation of processors.
@GeekPI: "At least when it comes to the new mac pro, it doesn't offer any hard drives faster than 7,200 RPM."
Apple does offer RAID. I'm not sure why they don't offer 15,000 RPM SAS drives or SSDs in them at the moment (I thought they used to) but you can always install them yourself (and they would cost less than whatever Apple charged you anyway, right?). If you want RAID, the odds of you not knowing how to install a hard drive are pretty minimal.
The Cobra Tag may help you win that losing battle, acting as a Bluetooth device that attaches to your key ring and connects to your phone, it gives you the opportunity to find the missing item if it's less than 30 feet away.
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Must suck to be whoever owns this when one of those pins in the tray connector goes bad...or when the PSU fails..
sure, it's nice to look at, and i'm sure it's plenty fast, but if i'm paying top dollar, i want to be involved in the design and build process
But this is for photographers/designers who dont know sqat about the internals of a PC and want something they know will be a beast.
And I thought that this was targeted at the uber-geeks at Engadget who only think about the specs and lowest price and if it can play Crysis or GTA 4. [just acting like all the other trolls right there]
I'm willing to bet that 75% of the people who moan about the bad specs of Macs don't have PCs of those specs.
Why would the pins fail anymore than any other pin connector setup that's only ever unplugged once in the lifetime of the machine? How often do you switch out your ram?
Yeah, curse all those times i've had a pin failure, because those _do_ exist.
Say what you will about PC users not having computers of the same power, or how this is geared towards people who won't customize computers, that doesn't change the fact that custom hardware like this needlessly increases the complexity and cost of fixing anything. The tray system for the hard drives and such isn't bad, voodoo did something similar with their [now dead?] Omen PC, but the non-standard nature of the motherboard could very easily cause problems. This also screams of the late 80's/early 90's design of putting things like processors on add-in cards. last computer I saw that in was running Pentium III.
I think the chance of something going wrong when you reach your hand inside an old model is more likely than a pin being damaged from the motion of that horizontal sliding.
hum dude you can get the extended warranty which gives you free repairs in the ext 3 years so no it does not suck at all. Plus when I used to work at a fairly large IT department we used to service PC hardware ( gateway + dell ) about 5-10 times more often than we did Macs. And replacing parts on Macs was fairly simple then and even simpler now ( not talking about iMacs ).
People seriously like to "build" their computers still? Really? I hate to break it to you but a manufacturer putting millions of dollars into the testing and design of a system can do FAR more than someone matching specs off Newegg. When you can build parts that are meant to work with each other you end up with a far more impressive result (iMac), something that a system builder can never dream of doing.
Find me a mass installation of computers in a missions critical environment that aren't all Dell or some other major manufacturer. When you start dealing with the big boys, you'll get laughed out of the room if you suggest building your own PC.
utahnkid ...
My benchmarks would disagree with you.
A well built computer by an enthusiast will trounce over pre-builts from Dell, Apple, HP, etc in most cases.
@ Utah kid
That is called "mass production" items are tested together so they can be knocked out cheap in huge quantities.
A pro self build can easily trounce mass produced you obviously just don't know how and need HP/Apple/Dell engineers to do it instead and their eye is purely on profit.
@ utahnkid -
I'm not talking about mission-critical environments, of course they'll all be running the same platform all across the board, and you must think i'm an idiot if you think i don't realize that the "big guys" can potentially build a more reliable product (although half their goal is to make the product as cheap to produce as possible). I work in these environments every day.
Perhaps this is just a difference of opinion, but i'm not someone who takes pride in owning the same thing as everyone else.... I want something that suits my own tastes, and I want granular control over the components that are inside it. Freedom of choice is important to me, and Apple denies PAYING CUSTOMERS that right more than many other manufacturers. Whether it's the components inside their machines or the applications they're running, i believe that everyone deserves full control over their own personal computing experience.
The computers in current commercial aircraft are installed in a rack system that uses connectors with similar pins. Those computers get removed and installed regularly for troubleshooting / maintenance. They work in far harsher conditions and they rarely fail, so why would a computer sitting in your study be any less reliable?
@bjsguess
OK I will bite.... so you think your computer can hang with the Mac Pro, huh?
Try to beat a score of 23126 on the Cinebench R10 multi-core rendering test (scored on my 2008 Mac Pro... not one of these new machines) :
http://www.maxon.de/pages/download/cinebench_e.html
Even an overclocked 4GHz Quad core cannot come close to a Mac Pro with 8 Xeon cores chewing away at something. For professonals who need the incredible power of an 8 core Xeon workstation, there is really nothing out there better for the money than the Mac Pro.
Which brings me to MY challenge. Try building and equivalent Xeon workstation with the same processors and same features as the Mac Pro for less. It cant be done... I looked hard at my options when I was buying, and Apple is a good 1,500 dollars LESS than their competition! Even if you build one yourself!
Those Xeon quadcores in the Mac Pro are 1000 dollars EACH on newegg so 2,000 dollars just for the processors alone! Hmmm, these new Mac Pros are seeming like a deal now for a lot of people, I bet. At least for those who NEED this kind of power, anyway. For gamers or websurfers, this machine is silly. But for 3D, video, scientific applications, and anything else heavily multithreade... or for someone who runs quite a few programs at the same time, this machine is amazing.
This absolutely insane computing power is why I... as a PC user... bought a Mac Pro, and it has been the best PC I have ever owned, by far.
Sean
Dell's Precision (the T7400) puts a world of hurt on the Mac Pro. At least when it comes to the new mac pro, it doesn't offer any hard drives faster than 7,200 RPM. The Dell has Raid 0,1, or 5 15k SCSI drives. Regardless of processor speeds, especially on 8-core systems, the hard drive is the bottle neck. Also since the new Mac Pro currently lacks any 'Pro' version video card, like the Quadro line from Nvidia. Those are massive drawbacks on the Mac Pro compared to what else is out there.
BTW: New Mac Pro
Two 2.93 quad Xeon (Nehalem)
8GB 1066 ram (DDR 3)
640gig 7200 RPM (Raid 5)
GeForce G 120 512MB
3-year Applecare
$7,348
Dell Precision T7400
Two 3.20 quad Xeon X5472 (1600 FSB)
8GB 800 ram (DDR2)
173gig 15k SCSI (Raid 5)
1.5GB Quadro FX4800
4year, 4hr 7x24 Onsite service
$7,335
It'd be interesting to see the performance between the two systems. The dell vastly outclasses the Mac Pro with hard drive and video card, but falls behind on RAM speed. The proc's may be comparable, but I have yet to see any benchmarks.
/Has a similar Dell 8-core Dell T7400
@GeekPI
The Mac Pro's CPU's will destroy those old ones. The performance increase is that big, really.
http://www.macrumors.com/2009/03/14/updated-mac-pro-benchmarks-and-video-of-internals/
Yeah, but the Nehalem processors were not invented by Apple, and they are not exclusive to Apple... so anyone who builds or buys a system with the Nehalem processors in them will achieve the same performance. And you are right, the new Nehalem processors are supposed to be extremely fast, and much faster than the previous generation of processors.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20081118082708_Intel_to_Initiate_Shipments_of_Nehalem_Processors_Early_Next_Year.html
I know, just saying :)
@GeekPI: "At least when it comes to the new mac pro, it doesn't offer any hard drives faster than 7,200 RPM."
Apple does offer RAID. I'm not sure why they don't offer 15,000 RPM SAS drives or SSDs in them at the moment (I thought they used to) but you can always install them yourself (and they would cost less than whatever Apple charged you anyway, right?). If you want RAID, the odds of you not knowing how to install a hard drive are pretty minimal.