How would you change Apple's Nehalem-based Mac Pro?

Apple's freshest Mac Pro, which was the first machine of any kind to ship with Intel's newest Nehalem-based Xeon processors, has been on the block for a few months now. By our estimation, that's plenty of time for the pros (and "prosumers," if you will) to get a good feel of their new workstation. Design wise, not a lot has changed in the machine, but we're anxious to know how you feel about the more subtle changes as well as the internal overhauling. Apple's charging a small fortune for this bad boy, so we fully expect you to be critical here. What's it missing? What should've been included? Are you still bitter that WiFi is a $50 option on a multi-thousand dollar machine? Sound off below!

[(Unverified) Posted May 10th 2009 10:21PM]

I don't see this machine as too expensive. If you are using professionally you'll be saving time and money compared with an AVID or other video editing solution. The same goes for photographers, graphic artists, animators, etc... why? because your time is money. I own a mac and a PC, I am the defacto computer support guy for my family and friends. Those who have a mac are happy and bother me rarely, those with PCs come to me frequently. If I charged them $20/hr for my services every single one of them would be way better off with a mac. Now, some small portion of the population can build themselves a hackintosh and get most of the benefits of a mac without the expense of the hardware.

There are some areas where this machine seems clearly lacking.

1. who is the target audience for this device? Professionals (non-professionals are much more likely to get an imac for half the price) graphic artists, animators, small movie makers, music makers.
* They all need LOTS of storage. I would build a high quality (most are low quality) hot swappable 3.5" SATA doc into the machine so storage was as simple as buying a new drive. Even 4Tb of storage fills up fast if you're shooting 6 hours of video 3 or 4 times a week (pretty normal for a wedding videographer).
* I would make the machine water cooled so it was as quiet as possible.
* Blue ray recorders should at least be an option. (at 179 on newegg, they're totally affordable for professionals)
* More ports on the FRONT. Two USB and one firewire port isn't enough for people that have a LOT of peripherals. There is a design issue here of how the front of the machine can simultaneously look clean and have a lot more ports (I don't quite know how to solve it elegantly).

[(Unverified) Posted May 13th 2009 12:25AM]

I NEVER heard so many jews bitch about Apple. tell you the truth it can run any game at high speed and run windows a lot better then a pc with no problems given from a hand build custom pc. If you think pc is better your wrong Apple can run anything if not better plus we experience from both sides windows and mac os x so we know how pc runs. We need the extra ram slots and extra stuff if comes with because we use graphics and movie editing witch uses 8 cores and 32gb ram but 32gb is a lot so it's ahead of the game for pc right now. Vista and windows 7 can't support that nor will they ever anytime soon.

[(Unverified) Posted May 11th 2009 7:42AM]

>I call bullshit.
..ok, that's your prerogative.

>source & price each one of those things, with links.
>burden of proof is on you.
..I believe I did - the website is pricewatch.com, as I mentioned, and all those numbers with the dollar signs and decimals are the prices.

>Oh wait, did you say OS X doesn't run on non-Apple i7's yet?
..I didn't mention anywhere what OSX runs on. You must be looking at some other post.

>And I'm sure it's totally easy to assemble that for anyone. An hour at most and no debugging of the assembly of the parts. Piece of >piss.
..not sure what you're getting at here. Yes it's possible to build a box from this stuff. No, it's not going to be as easy as pulling a mac pro out of the box and plugging it in. I don't know where the piss comes into play. Hopefully that's not how you're christening new boxes.

>Do you work for iSuppli and Microsoft?
..No, I don't work for iSuppli, and I would never work for Microsoft.

As an aside, wikipedia mentions that the Mac Pro actually uses the Xeon 5570 CPU rather than the 7350. I'm not sure what to believe, but if that's the case, it would drop the price of the PC by about $800 ( That 7350 is one expensive chip! ). If you add in the motherboard that I forgot in my original post - ( Around $260 for a cheapo dual LGA-1366 board on NewEgg.com ), then we're talking about the Mac pro being $540 more expensive than the frankenbox. I seriously doubt that it's possible to find the above mentioned prices in any brick-and-mortar store, so you'd have to ship at least some of those PC parts. You'll offset some of that cost by potentially saving yourself sales tax depending on where you live and where you buy from online. You can, however, go to the apple store and pick up that Mac Pro for the list price if there's an Apple store nearby. When all is said and done, my bet would be that the price difference would be under $400, with the frankenbox being the more expensive. To me, paying the extra for the Mac Pro would be worth it.

-S-

[(Unverified) Posted May 11th 2009 10:40AM]

My biggest complaint is that they dont make the chassis rack-mountable.

[Leicaman Posted May 11th 2009 11:22AM]

There are two new GPUs coming for Mac Pros in June. Very fast, workstation class GPUs. And yes, it's about freaking time.

And yes, I gladly pay up to several hundred bucks to get a Mac and avoid the Microsoft tax (constant trouble, cheesy graphics, less capable interface, controls of the OS in convoluted control panels hard to read, no real scripting capabilities related to the apps for the OS made by anyone, etc.) to get OS X.

[jcmoonraker Posted May 11th 2009 11:59AM]

esata

[X3HaloEd Posted May 20th 2009 6:25PM]

"How would you change Apple's Nehalem-based Mac Pro?" I would reformat and dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubutnu. Wait, scratch that. I would buy the same hardware for 50% less, and then dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu.

[Wwhat Posted May 11th 2009 9:11PM]

Only thing I want from apple is a percentage of their profits :)

[(Unverified) Posted May 14th 2009 7:49AM]

@rDub
I don't have time to go over all your 'calculations'. But you didn't mention the cost of a high quality mouse and keyboard($100). Or Mac OS X($130), or The cost of iLife 09($80). And $100 or so, for a lian case is way out... my $300 lian case is not a patch on my mac cases flawless design. so off the top of my head I can think of over $500 more then you worked out.... Question; does your system have firewire 800? Do you have both optical audio ins and outs? .... I don't know but we are now only $300 off your build your own price.... Is your system going to be silent? You say you gave your system 1 GB of ram !?! (you do know the mac comes with 3)... All I'm saying is their is more to an apple then you might think.