[X4U] New Mac Pro - any thoughts...?

[Stroller]

On 9 Aug 2006, at 05:12, revDAVE wrote:

> New Mac Pro - any thoughts...?

I want one. Of course.

It's a very compelling idea for me to be able to boot to Windows to  
play games, and Aperture is killer slow on my G5. My G5 is worth half  
of what I paid for it last year, so it's not worth selling - I can  
stick in the cupboard under the stairs & run iCal server on it.  :D

But then two grand sterling is a decent chunk of change. My G5 is  
only slow at one thing - I find it blinding fast at everything else,  
and a graphics card would fix Aperture. That would surely cost me  
less than £200 from Strangedogs.

And I can run iCal server on Linux. w00t!
[1]

So if I stick with my G5 for a while I'll have a lot more money left  
over for a Wii and games for it.

I was really expecting the Mac Pro (stupid name) to be a big deal; I  
was thinking I'd want to buy one straight away, but somehow I'm not  
so excited about it.


I've read a load of commentary about the Mac Pro's case being "same  
old, same old" and "unexciting".
Am I the only person that thinks this is crazy?
I mean, with my G4 with the mirrored doors, I could see what the fuss  
was about once I got my hands on it... but everyone I knew who was  
into Macs was wowed when the G5 came out, and once I got my hands on  
one I was blown away by the attention to detail - the aluminium case  
and the way it's put together still blows me away.

I'm not convinced that many people need a second drive bay, but Apple  
have plenty of smaller options, so I don't think that's a big deal.  
At least it's got an adequate number of USB ports on it - looks like  
4 on the back in the gallery on Apple's site.


> Looking inside the pics - I don't see any fans ... Is this gonna  
> get hot?
> (Glad to have low heat chips - but it still might get hot....)

It looks to me like the large grey section bottom-left in this photo  
might all be fans - it covers more than half of the fascia.
The grey section bottom-right is certainly a fan - you can see that  
from the photos of the rear.
http://images.apple.com/macpro/gallery/images/macpro04_20060807.jpg

Apple have been doing these big ole' towers with handles on them for  
long enough. They messed up with fans on one of the G4 models, I'm  
sure they won't do it again.

But then I could be wrong - I have this idea there's a bit of a risk  
of getting bitten by something with a first gen Mac, and if it's not  
fans then it could easily be something else; I think it's wrong to  
focus on that because if there's a design-flaw it's as likely to be  
in some tiny component tucked away somewhere that the designer hasn't  
considered as it is to be in something that you & I can pick out from  
photos.

If you want one, you want one, if you need one then you need it; at  
least you've got the whole first 12 months in which to contemplate  
buying an extended warranty.

Stroller.



[1] Way to go Steve! PLEASE, Please, please let iCal be the Exchange- 
killer.