Apple Mac Pro hands-on
By Ryan Block 
posted August 7th 2006 3:06PM
posted August 7th 2006 3:06PM
posted August 7th 2006 3:06PM
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I don't get $5300 when I add up the Dell as posted by rip, I get $4742. That's a Dell Precision 690 with all the same specs. 'Superdrive' is another Applespeak descriptive for a DL DVD-R/CD-RW 16x. BTW, the Apple options cost more - the 4500 on the Mac is $200 more than that option on the Dell.
Comparing Apple to Alienware is laughable. There's hundreds of places you could get this setup for less... Alienware're owned by Dell now, anyway.
If you need a desktop (re: configurable) computer at a lesser price, you can always opt for a used G5. A lot of people will be unloading theirs about now. I've always found buying a generation old Mac is equivalent to a new, slower PC, the used Macs are cheaper (with extras), and are typically in excellent shape.
Well, the price seems pretty damned good to me for the hardware your getting. I think the product line spans the price range pretty nicely between the core solo mini and the Mac Pro.
Dell has support issues, both real and imagined.
I've never had to bring any of my Mac on for support, so I can't comment on that at all.
I have dealt with Dell and Alienware and I found their consumer customer support ... lacking, to say the least.
Typically the corporate customer support is much better, IBM/Lenovo and HP generally take only 1 phone call in my experience before they send the replacement parts (and sometimes people to replace them)
Me thinks Apple could take a big bite of Dell if they wanted to attack.
I have to agree with tugboat. A singe processor version for ~500 less (or whatever) would really sell. I suppose that isn't part of the deal when you buy woodcrests in bulk though.
I guess I could try and judge it myself by the comparing the relative size of the front ports and bays, but I'll just go straight to asking Ryan Block:
Hey, Ryan-
Seeing it in person, does it look like they pared off any height or width from the G5 tower?
This is a "pro" machine. Apple isn't going to make a "lite" version. They mean business. I remember my dad paid over $4000 for a Mac SE and an ImageWriter dot-matrix printer. Today's prices are way low.
@pixelator
Did you pick the correct CPU?
Dual Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5150 2.66GHz, 4MB L2,1333 [Included in Price]
re: PCI-X slots
The machine has no PCI-X slots. All the slots are PCI-E. They are not the same thing.
One thing I wonder about is the number of PCI-E lanes for the non-graphics slot. Apple specs just say that this is variable, without providing further details.
Folks, this is the "Mac Pro". The transition is indeed "complete" (well, almost - the Xserve isn't shipping yet), but that doesn't mean there aren't new products coming down the road. Notice something missing in the following?
MacBook Pro
MacBook
Mac Pro
????
Maybe the "Mac" will just be a new all-in-one, but maybe the "Mac" is going to be "the tower for the rest of us". We can hope!
And on the other side of the fence... giving all the problems with early-adopter MacBook Pros and MacBooks (including my MacBook which has developed an unbearable high-pitched squeal and hissing sound from the left speaker, requiring it to go back for repair), I wish all the early-adopter Mac Pro purchasers the best of luck....
So basically I have to make room for another refrigerator to get one of these babies. Are the Japanese officially fleeing Tokoyo?
@sjonke
MacBook Pro
MacBook
Mac Pro
Mac mini
and the iMac.
Comparison I did with a Dell. Very Comprable and the exact same Graphics Card. The Mac is almost $800 cheaper.
http://www.koollaid.com/mpro2.jpg
http://www.koollaid.com/Dell2.jpg
pixelator is either using coupons we do not have access to or is not configuring the machine with two dual core Core 2 Duo Xeons with 1.33GHz FSB and opted for slower ram. Either that or he is a lying troll.
I configured the same machine mentioned on dell's site and got $5,315 USD.
@pixelator:
Well, your Dell configuration still costs more than the Mac Pro... even with the "cheaper" graphics card.
The more expensive graphics card for the mac is probably more than just the Apple mark-up, however... Mac graphics cards still need a Mac-specific firmware, which probably contributes to most of the cost difference. You still can't just go out and buy a standard PC graphics card and drop it into the Mac Pro, unfourtunately.
Dual optical drives? Is that new? I've had dual optical drives in my PC for years.
@ Robin:
The only "professional" Macs to not have a dual optical drive option since the first G3s are the G5 towers. So no, it ain't new.
Nice box. I will skip this generation probably, since I've got a quad, but I'd like to say ***WTF*** about Bluetooth still being a built to order option on the Mac Pro? Um, I would like to use Bluetooth but not buy the machine from Apple, maybe, but have no choice. That's really frustrating...
You did understand that this event is called WWDC world wide developper conference? and the stuff presented there is for developpers right?
Im gettin 2
Mac is simplely peace of art, have 4 mac myself, couldn't be happier with them.
reading the comments above shows two things:
1) a huge percentage of them have absolutely no idea what the hell they are talking about as they've never even touched an apple product outside of an ipod or a quicktime video
2) but are absolutely sure they are right in their assessment of the situation.
@treetrunk, moog55, samc, pixelator, etc...
just configured mine. donations now accepted for a total of $9,226-.
"wow! $2,124 for the lowest possible config?
This confirms my belief that only die-hard apple fans could be led into believing that's acceptable."
Last time I checked this isn't a personal computer. Hence the mac PRO title. This is definitly geared towards the creative professionals.
I work on a relatively new dual 2ghz, and it even chugs at times for large image files in photoshop or illustrator.
The increase in productivity for a designer from a high class machine justifies its cost.
I worked on an old g4 at my last job. I was freelance making $29 an hour. I would find myself waiting minutes between actions. This adds up. Those minutes saved every day pay for the computer in a matter of weeks if not days.
@re Hard drives
I talked to the guys there and the hard drives are simple, normal hard drives that one just attaches the little carriages in. Once attached, plug-it-in plug-it-in (like the jingle for the air freshener)
Wow, what a very PC like case arrangement. Anyone notice that the ports are now in 2 columns (unlike previous G3,G4,G5s and more like PCs), the PSU is on top, etc. Why are there 2 fans in the front and only one in the back? It looks like a cross between a sloppy PC case and G5 Aluminum case: its ugly. On the plus side there should be some cheap PowerPC Quad G5s to pick up.
ivan
"As an owner of the Original Dual 1.8ghz G5, I think that the Mac Pro is creating too much of a gap between the consumer and pro machines. When the G5s came out, there were offerings at $1,600, and at times $1,400, sure you didn't get dual processors, but you had expansion slots, and two HD bays. I really hope Apple will release a more watered down version of this machine, with expansion slots, a slower processor and at a significant price cut. For students who deal with digital content, these new Mac Pros are too expensive, and an iMac or Macbook Pro just won't cut it for non lab use. I know that this machine is great in comparison to the competition, but there needs to be something for those of us who need a little more power for our money."
I too am an owner of a dual 1.8 Ghz G5. But I disagree with you.
Mac Pro is not for the readily available consumer. This is a workstation designed for people who work. as someone said, this is not meant for someone to watch a movie on. Consumers can easily buy an iMac to handle their consumer needs. But I bought my computer for Design reasons. I am using my Mac for Adobe CS2, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro 7, and other processor intensive programs that you can't use on anything else.
Mac is not creating a gap because there always WAS a gap in the first place. There are the consumers, the prosumers, and the professionals.
Also. The standard Mac Pro is almost identical to last generation G5 set ups. So no one can complain. It's just the way people configue these systems, that make them seem like the Mac Pro is too expensive. Mac is expensive, but if you're not gonna use Logic, FCP, and any other intensive programs, just use your money on an iMac. Mac Pro is for Pro users. hence the word "Pro".....
Maybe Apple price the Mac Pro like this, to make way for something new in the lineup. They only have one MacPro which you configure. Instead of 3 like before.
Apple is clearly changing their lineup and I think they will introduce a new between mini and pro consumer very soon.
Stop getting pissed people, no one knows if they will or not. Just be patient.
@CM: The Apple fellow I talked to at WWDC said that there are 32 lanes on the PCI-E bus, dynamically allocated among all 4 cards. At boot time, if you insert a card, the boot-up process will notice and do the right thing.
There is likely a fan for the power supply as well, so that would be 2 fans in front and 2 fans in back.
I don't really think it looks much different than the G5 design.
Geoffry -
"Consumer computers and toys do not get revealed at WWDC - they never have been."
What about the fsking iSight? I don't think that's exactly a developer toy.
Dunno why some Mac fanboys are complaining about silly things like the PSU being at the top. If you bothered to check, the old PMG3-PMG4's all had the PSU at the top. Same goes for the 8600 and 9600 style towers. Same for the 8500/Quadra 800/840AV tower. See a pattern?
Dunno why some Mac haters are in denial that these Dual Xeon Woodcrest workstations (especially the default 2.6GHz model) are fairly price competitive with like offerings from vendors like Dell, HP, or Gateway. I just wouldn't buy the RAM or drives from Apple though since they charge a ludicrious premium and they are also making money on both the downgrade to 2Ghz and upgrade to 3GHz (the average difference based on the Intel retail price list would be closer to $800 than the $300 off Apple gives and the upgrade to 3.0GHz would be closer to $300 as opposed to the $800 Apple charges). The 2.6GHz Mac Pro represents the best price/performance value.
Finally, there is a huge gap now in the $1600-$1800 price range for something with some expansion capabilities beyond the iMac (and I'd prefer not to get an AIO). I would gladly fork over cash to Apple if they were to come out with a smaller headless box using Conroe in the next few weeks. I'd be fine if it has half the drive bays (2 HD's and 1 optical), half the number of RAM slots, 1 free PCI-e. The Mac Pro is a bit overkill for me. However, I'm also aware that Apple is concerned about cannibalizing their high margin Mac Pro's and wouldn't be surprised if they just ended up relegating Conroe into the iMac. The Gateway I configured with the E6600 looks mighty tempting ($1,760 with 2GB RAM and 250GB SATA) except it doesn't legally do OS X (dearly want to get away from Windows you know)...
in case anyone's interested, Apple neglected to mention this:
http://www.macosforge.org/
and
http://lists.apple.com/archives/Darwin-dev/2006/Aug/msg00067.html
good to see Apple are opening things up again. not the closure of opendarwin kinda makes sense.
and about the keynote, little disappointed, but i really can't wait to get my hands on leopard now.
Al.
@jimbohlar
"I also love the marketing spin on the speed of the PRO apps on the Mac Pro vs. the Quad. Last time I checked...1.2 times faster is sure sounds a lot better than saying a twenty percent performance increase (one year for a twenty percent difference???)"
Isn't this comparing the high end G5 with the standard (or perhaps even low end) Intel? So a 20% increase sounds pretty good imo.
A friend of mine has done a careful study of this new stuff
http://www.waddo.net/textshumour/short_texts/windows_v_mac.html
I hereby coin the phrase "g4etto style" for those of us in the who still rock pre-Macintels.
I'm keeping it g4etto for a while until Adobe bring out the Universal updates.
Excellent machine.
I will go for one in the next months I think :)
As some have pointed out, this is in fact cheaper than comprable machines from the likes of Dell. However, while this may be a good thing for the small subsection of an already small market share of consumers who would like such a product, it is not a good thing for Apple.
Apple have struggled historically because they tried to do everything themselves. While most computer companies could slap together a bunch of standardised components, install an OS which would work with just about anything (I find it remarkable that the five year-old XP has only had three revisions. Yesterday Apple announced the sixth revision of OS X, which is the same age and only has to work on a TINY subsection of Apple-selected hardware) and still have room to stick a little profit on top, Apple made all the hardware, used a different processor, and wrote their own OS. This gave Apple more freedom with design than other companies - their hardware and OS interface are prettier - but massively increased their R&D costs (developing a whole OS is INCREDIBLY expensive), for which they demanded a fairly substantial price premium.
Gradually, that all changed. Their hardware is now standardised. Their processors are the same as everyone else. They have completely lost their hardware differentiation. There's nothing to seperate the Mac Pro from a Dell but the design of the case. Both have the same hardware. Both can run either OS (yes, it's harder to run OS X on a Dell than the other way around, but this is Apple's fault, not Dell's. Apple made a utility to let their customers run XP, but didn't want it happening the other way. Of course, it wasn't long till someone figured it out, and it's now very easy.).
The last vestige of the "old" Apple was price. In the destop market, it started to go with the Mini. With the Mac Pro, it went at the top end too. For a fairly-high end workstation, the Mac Pro is actually pretty cheap. It's several hundred dollars cheaper than the same machine from Dell - and Dell didn't have the cost of developing an OS. Apples profit per machine must be TINY. You can see where they've cut corners - the case hasn't changed much, and has become more in layout like an ordinary PC one.
It seems to me Apple doesn't know who it is anymore. They still, quite naiively, seem to try to compete on performance, with the old arbitary "X times faster" figures and the like - but realistically, don't go there. At the same time, they're trying to compete on price. You can't do both!
"...er, is there a Lith-Ion batter in the Mac pro? ...moron. and isn't it Dell who seems to be having a larger PR problem with the explosions?"
dells pr problem, sumhow i think dell have had more of the laptops blow up as more people have them, think abought it
"(I find it remarkable that the five year-old XP has only had three revisions. Yesterday Apple announced the sixth revision of OS X, which is the same age and only has to work on a TINY subsection of Apple-selected hardware)"
You are an idiot. The revisions of Mac OS X add new features while Windows Service Packs fix a broken OS. In fact your entire post shows what a complete ****tard you are. I'm pretty sure Apple knows what it's profit margins are and what it can afford and not. So instead of writing some garbage about Apple losing its identity at a time when it's doing better than it has at any point in its history just shut the hell up.
dells pr problem, sumhow i think dell have had more of the laptops blow up as more people have them, think abought it
Firstly please, please and I mean this from the bottom of my heart; LEARN HOW TO SPELL. The occasional incorrect letter is forgiven but butchering a word like about by putting a 'g' and an 'h' in there demonstrates a worringly low intelligence level. Secondly Apple have a 12% market share of the laptop market. What exactly is Dell's market share?
I've done a few price comparisons on my own to see what the real story is on the price debate. As with most things the devil is in the detail. It is possible to configure systems with Dell and Apple where both sides come out as better value. In the end the price difference between them if you average it all out is pretty negligible.
In the end even if you can get the same specs for $500 less, you certainly won't get the same elegance or durability in the design of the case. Many of the prospective buyers for a Mac Pro really appreciate this. They are power users, but not power tinkerers. They want to be able to put a new HDD in their machine fast, and they don't want to have to worry about LBA support or any other weirdness.
If you have the time and interest to play around with your computers hardware and operating system then perhaps a cheaper solution from someone else is right for you, but personally having been out of the windows world for 7 years now, I don't miss that side of computer life. Of course I do have a small cheap second-hand Dell under the desk too that I play with when curious about the latest linux distro and am in the mood for fiddling with partitions and BIOS updates. :)
One said "1.2 times faster is sure sounds a lot better than saying a twenty percent performance increase (one year for a twenty percent difference???)"
0.2 would be 20%. 1.2 is 120%. How's that for a change.
BTW,
I just configured a dual dual core xeon system from Alienware. And one from Dell.
Apple:
Dual 2.66 (2 cpus)
2GB RAM
250GB HD
Superdrive
Quadro FX 4500 512MB
Price: $4,449.00
Alienware:
Dual 2.66 (2 cpus)
2GB RAM
250GB drive
Superdrive
Quadro FX 3500 256MB
Price: $6,041.00
Dell:
2.66 dual core xeon (2 cpus)
2GB RAM
Quadro fx 4500
Superdrive
250GB drive
Price: $5300.00
Yeah, Apple hardware is overpriced... :P
Indeedy, plus you dont get osx with a dell or alienware lol, and you can run windows even in a safe osx environment on the mac, PC nerds, dont buy macs if ya dont like em, but come on, just cause you havnt got a clue dont make up FUD
Gee with all that potential power it would be nice if the thing could actually play...games, id take a fully loaded voodoo over that any day of the week
@Forest: I don't get it, why can't it play games? It can boot Windows, so it can play any game the Voodoo can if games is what you're into. I just had a look at those Voodoo machines, and apart from being overpriced they're damn ugly.
Tugboat - I agree that a "watered" down version would be nice, but I wonder if it doesn't add a least common denominator that we could really do without. Even as a student I ended up spending around $2500 for my Mac - that was over 10 years ago. I've spent about that much for every pro machine I've gotten since (except my recent jump to an Intel iMac, but that isn't pro). And as a rule of thumb I always recommend whoever I'm working for to purchase at least the mid level pro machine whenever possible. I'm in a situation now where one of our artists has the "low-end" Quicksilver - and you know when they bought it they got the cheapest box they could get. They weren't thinking along the lines of video cards, cache, etc. - so they inadvertently screwed themselves in the long run. At least now I'm not pitching the mid-level to the boss, I'm pitching the base model, which is an easier sell. You can actually downgrade the processor and HD to get it to $2124 though.
Fred- Congratulations on a throughly intelligent post. I'm not entirely sure what brought you to the conclusion that I am an "idiot" and "****tard", since you didn't say, but anyway.
Unfortunately, you are quite incorrect. There are two primary purposes of OS X revisions- firstly, to add support for new hardware. This is why, for example, the Mighty Mouse says it requires "Mac OS X v10.4.6 or later". A more major revision came with the x86 releases. Secondly, just like with XP, to fix bugs.
Yes, revisions can also add new features, but this is merely something of a bonus for consumers, or in the case of Apple's more major pay-for upgrades, an incentive to buy. You're incorrect that "new features" are unique to OS X - XP SP2 added a native firewall, native wireless and bluetooth support, pop-up blocking, and new versions of media player and movie maker, amongst others.
As for "garbage about Apple losing its identity" - how do you justify this as "garbage"? Apple started as a computer company which refused to follow the crowd. It now makes computers with the same components as everyone else, and makes most of it's sales in iPods. It used to compete on quality and uniqueness, but now that's been watered down and it's trying to compete on price. I don't know where it's going, and sometimes I get the feeling they're not sure either!
Fred - the 12% figure often quoted refers to laptops sold in the month of June. Their actual market share is estimated at around 4.7%, up from 3.9% last year (MacWorld).
Carl - Not sure what you're saying here. He said 20% INCREASE. 120% is just a 20% increase on what you started with. An INCREASE of 120% would imply 120% over and above what you started with, which is 220%.
I as well see a need for a single processor machine in the $1500 price range. I don't doubt Apple may have one up it's sleve, but introducing it now is bad business sense. Many customer who may be in the market for a cheaper machine, are just going to fork over more money now because they don't want to wait. Apple will sell as many of these new machines as they can to these "on the fence" customers, then they will release something cheaper.
I sell computers part time while I'm in school. And believe me, non-pro customers will drop this sort of cash on a computer so they can have the newest toy, even if i try to convince them they don't need it!
The rest of us have to wait while the suckers get suckered.
It sucks, but it's all about money.