Apple today announced upgrades to the Mac Pro and the Xserve, which now feature Intel Penryn processors. Quad-core processors that go up to 3.2 Ghz, powerful video cards, and superfast front-side bus and memory make these especially delicious, however, there are still no Blu-ray drives available. Macrumors has more.
Apple Announces Penryn Mac Pros and Xservers
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From the Macrumors post, it APPEARS as if the new Mac Pros will only have access to these new video cards because of the PCI-E 2.0 spec, it will be interesting to see if the old Mac Pros will be given more options for video card upgrades besides “more 7300 gt cards” and “$400 ATI card that got bad reviews until model2 was released but is still a questionable upgrade.”
These cards will work in a PCI Express 1.0 slot. There’s no reason why these cards should not work in an older Mac Pro.
What about the reason: “they don’t work in a PCI Express 1.0 slot on Mac Pro’s currently”?
The first response was correct:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express#PCI_Express_2.0
Drool!!
how about you
Great expects but the memory is to low, only 2 gb.
You shouldn’t need more than 640k.
Seriously though, working with multi core machines like this a “good” rule of thumb for serious processing is about 1GB ram per core.
– 8GB of ram today doesn’t cost that much
– people buying this system likely don’t want to skimp anyways
Although I have to admit the only people I know who bought 8 core apple systems bought them pretty much just to be cool.
What makes me sad is that to build a full 8 core system yourself (tyan board, case, PS, hard drives, 12GB ram) cost ~$1400 back in september. That was with slower clovertowns at the time.
Edited 2008-01-08 20:43 UTC
Have you seen this link? http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=942
It doesn’t run OS X, ergo it doesn’t run FCP and other Apple Pro applications. You may diss that requirement, but some people do want (need) to run OS X.
I agree completely. If you want to run MacOS you have to go with a Mac which means you won’t be able to select hardwire options that best fit your price/performance requirements and you may have to pay a premium for a part which is available for far less.
Highly relevant. You do realize that you can build a cheaper, more powerful CPU from scratch than Intels current top of the line (if you forget to count the approximate 56687 years you need to build it). George Ou is always soooo insightful!
Seeing as how MacWorld is next week, you would think that the “most greatest” Mac Pros and Xservers would be good material. Maybe introducing these products would be a “waste” of time. This leads me to believe that Jobs spend his time introducing something new and exciting (also geared towards the average computer user). Things are getting really interesting.
Macworld is a “consumer” show, so Apple tends not to introduce pro products there. Also, the new Mac Pro is just an incremental update; it’s not that sexy.
Maybe, but it suggests that the keynote is powerful and fun enough to not need ANY filler at all.
Oh yeah… I predict they have a lackluster even half of which is spent touting iTunes success and retail store success and stuff like that. You don’t know Apple. The fact that they have announced something now doesn’t mean they were running out of time with the keynote speech…
Good they switched to Intel platform some time ago.
Nice upgrade – but it puts even further distance (with regards to performance AND price) between Apple’s pro and consumer lines. A Mac with an upgradeable graphics card now starts at $2799.
Optimists might see this as a ripe opportunity for Apple to release an upgradeable pro-sumer model between the iMac and the Mac Pro, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Still, if they’re getting this upgrade out early, it seems as though there should be some good stuff to be released come Macworld next week.
you can get a single slot quad core (default is 2 x quad core) and save $500 and a quad core is probably what 90% of the people really need (except for video production).
you can almost get it down to $2k or so which is pretty impressive. and i guess you could add you own 2nd quad core down the road too.
Ah, thanks for the correction. The store was down when I checked it earlier this morning and I took “standard 8-core configuration” a bit too seriously.
Still recommend passing on the configurable memory upgrades though – an extra $500 for two additional 1 GB chips!
Yeah, you should never upgrade your memory through the manufacturer, especially when that manufacturer is Apple. It is always cheaper to buy your memory upgrades from somebody else.
Boo. What Apple is really missing is a mid-size expandable tower.
If it cost around $900 and worked with external K/V/M, it would open up a whole new market.
Exactly! This is what I am waiting for. I have a dual-G4 tower that I paid $1200 or so, and there is no tower that I can replace it with. MacPro is too much power and cost. MacMini is too little. I switch my monitor between a BeOS/Windows computer and my Mac.
your dual g4 tower was $2-3k brand new.
if the latest mac pros are too much power, get a dual g5 or a first generation mac pro.
So he should have to buy something that is two years old? Does that make any sense? You know what a PC from 2 years ago looks like?
Just to give you a sense of reality here. I have a SEVEN year old iMac (the one with the dome base) that I do demos on for friends that are looking to buy a new Mac. I’ll note that I don’t tell them it isn’t my new Mac.
Why? Because I show them all the things I can do with it, including editing video, burning DVDs, how it works with my iPod. They are typically amazed at how well everything works and everything that you can do on it. And yes, it is one of the computers (all Macs at home) that we use every day. It doesn’t collect dust.
I show them all that and THEN I tell them it is my iMac I bought in the summer of 2000. That’s when they realize the difference between a PC and a Mac.
Most people don’t buy a new computer because the hardware is too slow. Most people buy a new Windows PC when they do because Windows is so #$*&#$*& up that it runs like #$*#*$&.
THEN I show them how I can do it with my new (8 month old) white 24″ Intel Core 2 Duo iMac.
Then I tell them you can run both Mac and Windows on the same computer (obviously only on my new imac) and I show that to them. Then I show them Parallels and VMWare (I’ve purchased both to do the demos but don’t use it for anything I do).
Again they are amazed. And they agree there are zero reasons to buy a PC when you can buy a Mac and get both.
What about Linux (and Haiku and all the rest)? You can run those too and I show them.
Ninety percent of the people I give this demo to buy a Mac within two months. Ninety-five percent will have bought a new Mac within a year. Only about five percent say Macs are too expensive. Meanwhile they replace their PC every couple of years and spend more than they would on a Mac.
I’ve done this demo at work, bringing my old and new iMacs in. EXTREMELY hard core Windows and UNIX fans that hated Apple and Macs are also stunned at what you can do on Macs compared to “what they heard Macs can do”. And the UNIX guys (and woman) are stuffed when I show them the BASH shell and that it is really BSD UNIX underneath and certified POSIX UNIX to boot.
About 20% of those people bought Macs within the first two months. A total of about 40% of bought at least a Mac mini during the last eight months. Almost all of them agree that without my demo they wouldn’t have considered a Mac.
Note that about 60% of them have iPods and the iPods did nothing to make them think of buying a Mac before I did my demo.
Yeah, yeah…I know. But I still wouldn’t purposely buy a two year old computer – Mac or not. I know, from experience, that Macs can preserve their value and performance for much longer, but that doesn’t mean I’d buy a PowerPC now. Especially since there’s no guarantee that Leopard+1 will run on it.
Most people don’t buy a new computer because the hardware is too slow. Most people buy a new Windows PC when they do because Windows is so #$*&#$*& up that it runs like #$*#*$&.
Very true.
Meanwhile they replace their PC every couple of years and spend more than they would on a Mac.
My Powerbook from three years ago feels slow running applications like Fireworks, Freehand, Dreamweaver, and Firefox. My 4 year old whitebox desktop feels quite snappy running those same applications. So the point is that there is no reason to be upgrading a normal PC every 2 years.
Regarding your year 2000 Mac. I bought a G3 imac around 2000 when OS 10.0 was released. I sold it to mac-of-all-trades 4 months later. 10.0 was nice but soooooo slow. OS 9 was fast but sooooo ugly and outdated. I even bought the PPC version of mandrake Linux to try and get some use out of the computer but that little experiment did not work out. So I can’t imagine that you demoed OS 10 since that was just too slow. If your demonstration was on OS 9 then I would imagine that our Amiga friends could claim the same thing but with much older hardware.
But the people you demo Mac to are not actually impressed by the Mac. They are impressed with your know how. You could have done the same thing with a Windows machine and they would have been just as impressed, but the misdirection of a different UI would not have been there to make them think it had something to do with Mac.
Mac OS is nice though I gave my mother my powerbook because it was ideal for her. I mean its very easy to use and she doesn’t notice that it slow.
“your dual g4 tower was $2-3k brand new.
if the latest mac pros are too much power, get a dual g5 or a first generation mac pro.”
And brand new PC was $5K in 1980, and yet I am not gonna rush over to buy a 20 yr computer.
The issue was not with processing power per se, but form factor. A mac pro is a mansion, a mac mini is a studio, and a iMac is an appartment. Maybe some people just wat a house?
A smaller tower, with upgradeable GFX and single socket non FBB core2 machine would be ideal.
The $2K entry barrier for a mac pro is way too rich for some people.
actually if you get rid of one of the cores you can get a system with a 8800gt for 2500. check the configurator.
A comparable (but slower bus and memory) Dell T7400 costs $3957 CAD while the base Mac Pro that is faster (bus and memory) only costs $2899 CAD. A faster computer for more than $1000 less!
But remember not to get RAM upgrades from Apple – wait a month or two and then get them from a third party supplier (with superior quality sometimes :o) for 1/3 the cost.
memory on Apple’s store, with 3.2ghz 8-core, 4 SAS 300GB drives w/ RAID card, NVIDIA Quatro FX 5600 1.5GB video w/ two 30″ Cinema displays, it came out to about $24,000.
Donations, anyone?
With all the Pros upgrading their machines there must be a big market out there for used first gen Apple Intel machines which have probably been upgraded quite a bit. I’m guessing memory won’t be carried over to the new machines. You should be able to get quite a computer for this.
One place to check would be a company that does a lot of graphics and find out what they do with their old machines when they upgrade.
where’s the this pc from what ever store cost only this mutch and it’s better than mac pro posts ?
I’ll stick with my Mini. Good value for the buck.
I guess we’ll have to wait for the upcoming Macworld Conference & Expo to hear if we’ll be seeing Macbook’s with a mobile version of the quad core processor and a Blue-Ray RW drive. Having that power in a mobile solution would be beneficial to professionals in the film, television and music industry.
The question I usually get asked is not how much would it cost to duplicate this from another supplier. Almost no one seems to think in these terms.
I usually get asked something like this: Here is the entry level machine at ^Alb1400 or so in the UK, with one quad processor, which someone is looking at. Then, says the questioner, I have also been over to Komplett
http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/cl.aspx?bn=10310
and checked out the Intel Extreme, and I seem to get a pretty decent machine for around ^Alb750. Yes, its a slower processor (though double the memory). I know that. I still have a question: Is it worth spending the extra, and if I am going to spend the extra, is the Mac the optimal way to spend it?
And I usually, though not always, say, if you are asking me, which means you’re not a real committed Mac user, probably not. The specs are not the same, you are right. The Mac has a lot higher specs, at least in terms of the processors. But I usually tell them, if money is a factor, and if you do not absolutely have to have the high end in processors, spend your extra on a lot more memory, and better bigger screens and more of them, and you will still have quite a bit left over. Put eight gigs in this, its still only ^Alb820. Put a couple of extra large disk drives in it too. You will have a much better balance between processor power and the rest of the configuration. The real price of the Mac is a lot more than it looks, because its so skimpy in its startup configuration.
I don’t always say this. It depends on how they work. But the killer, as people elsewhere have said, is the gap in the product line that force people to either spend a lot more than they need to (to fully equip it with disk and memory), or get something which is well below what they really need in terms of disk and memory, but is still more expensive than they want it to be.
You can get very nice very fast very well equipped machines now for well under ^Alb1000. Most of the time, not always, they are going to be both better and cheaper for the guy than the entry level Mac. To get comparable functionality in terms of memory and disk and graphics, he’s going to end up paying double, and having more machine than he needs.