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The Future of Apple's Pro Desktop Line
SB_SamuraiSam writes "WWDC is drawing nearer and ArsTechnica has a thorough look at what they think Apple's plans are for their future Pro desktop line. It's a decent read. As always Ars has a competent pulse on Apple and is more reasonable than purely speculative. From the article:
I think Apple's CPU choice is clear cut. Strange as it sounds, the Xeon 5100 series is the best fit for the Mac. If Apple wants to keep the Quad name alive, it's the only option. Dual CPU configurations are not possible with anything else in Intel land, so if Apple wants to offer two CPUs and four cores, Xeon is the only game in town. With the benchmarks we have seen, the Core 2 Duo is a clear winner for Intel, outperforming anything AMD has to offer. The Xeon? With its faster FSB and different memory, it's even faster than the Core 2 Duo."
It's pretty interesting how things have developed for Apple... It looks like Windows will be faster on an Apple machine than on any other factory-built desktops.
If you spend all your time working in a few select apps, it clearly makes more sense to wait until those apps work well on the hardware. Doing otherwise is just foolishness. OTOH, Adobe won't get their shit together until there are machines out there for the CS apps to run on, so telling Apple to hold off releasing the pro machines until Adobe is ready doesn't make sense. Chicken-egg thing...
This guy's the limit!
I think Ars made wonderful points and a well informed prediction. However, though this article is a few months old, I think that the principles behind it will still be in effect for Intel's upcoming lines, namely that a motherboard setup with a multi-core chip is in general cheaper than a roughly equivalently configured multi-chip one, and still for most applications the multi-core configuration will result in greater performance.
Falun Dafa is good!
I think the video and coding communities might have a bit to say about that. Not all Apple Pros depend of Photoshop, you know?
I don't have any numbers of any kind to back this up, so take this with several large dollops of salt, but: I suspect that the number of creative pros who rely on Adobe tools is much, much higher than the number of those who rely on the Apple in-house tools.
And don't underestimate the capacity of design pros to drag their feet. For years, I knew graphic artists who refused to upgrade to OS X because Quark wouldn't run natively in it. Of course, when the new version of Quark finally was release, Adobe's answer was arguably much better.
Here's a heaping pile of salt for you:
Your suspicion is based on the erroneous assumption that all "creative pros" are people who work in graphic design, publishing, web design, etc.
Let's not forget that filmmakers are "creative pros" and a lot of them are using Final Cut Pro Studio and Shake. Musicians are "creative pros" and a lot of them are aready using UB versions of Garageband or Logic. Ableton Live is also already Universal Binary, and very widely used by laptop musicians and DJs.
In fact, a lot of musicians are even using Final Cut Pro Studio, because they loved Soundtrack Pro and their only option to upgrade was an attractively priced crossgrade offer to FCP Studio.
There are many professional creatives already working on Intel Macs to earn their daily bread.
So let's stop acting as if design pros are the only pros who are "creative". They didn't invent creativity, and judging by the current state of the majority of the web, they're not the final word in it either.
Having owned Macs going all the way back to the beginning this is the first time I have ever been faced with Apple coming out with weaker machines than they already are shipping. This whole Intel mess with Apple is enough to make me sick enough to my stomach that I am faced with the first in my life feeling of moving beyond Apple.
People like you - the PowerPC devotee - make me embarrassed to be a 20+year Mac user.
Wasn't your Quad worth the money you paid for it when you bought it? You do realize Apple has to keep revving it's product line, don't you?
Face it - Intel's latest offerings are a better than the 970FX, which is a several-year-old design. The Core 2 has longer legs than the G5 in any form.
Apple's done it's users a favor by moving to a faster, less expensive, more readily available microprocessor part. They've also done users a favor by producing an easily-portable OS and gracious backwards compatibility.
You may pine for the days when you could argue the vagaries of microarchitectures you don't understand on Slashdot, but some of us actually have work to do and look forward to faster, more productive machines - and don't mind paying a few extra dollars for Apple design and the Mac OS. We like the relative simplicity Apple has brought to the x86 platform and we'll enjoy using our faster machines while you moan about your "Four by four monster style" PowerPC.
Go complain up a rope.
.. except that Cell is completely unsuitable for use as a desktop CPU.
For games consoles with dedicated software? Perhaps.
For scientific computing and HPC? Sure.
As an off-board number cruncher and accelerator chip? Yup.
As a desktop? Heck no, a multi-core x86 or indeed PPC knocks it in to a cocked hat.
BTW, I own both a dual 2GHz G5 and a dual-1.8 iMacIntel. The intel box smokes the G5 by a long distance.
On the other hand Quark lost market share by not moving to OS X in a timely manner. My wife's firm moved to InDesign when they upgraded to new OS X native machines back in the day. For every person who held out, another switched applications. Quark really dragged their feet on the conversion and I don't think Adobe will hold out as long on the move to UB, particularly if the hardware is selling well. People want the new hotness.
To stay on topic, I've always felt that Apple releases hardware and then developers create software to take full advantage of it. In short, hardware drives software development. It seems to differ slightly from the WinTel universe where hardware upgrades are often invoked by mew software. Admittedly, I have this perception because I always upgrade when new software runs dog slow on my PC. I don't seem to do that on my Mac as much, though the Intel move will probably hasten an upgrade from suddenly ancient G4.
While you do mention that Apple generally includes things that other manufactures do, I think you brush that off a bit too quickly. In the Apple computer that you mention here are a few of the things you forgot to mention:
Capacity of 16GB of memory. (the Dell maxes out at 8)
The video card has a Dual-Link DVI capable of driving 30" displays. (not on the standard Dell, probably an option)
Apple has two 4x PCI-Express slots and one 8x slot open. (the dell has one 1x and one 8x open.. but in fairness does have the space for SLI)
The Apple has FireWire 800, which if you are doing video is a god-send. (not an option on the Dell... you just can't pump that data over the busses if it is not connected to the NorthBridge and expect to have decent performance)
Optical audio in and out (probably an add-in option on the Dell... possibly third-party)
Go look at Dell's site for things that have those sorts of specs and you will be in the "Workstation" class products, and you will be looking at a large price jump.
And your summary judgement that the G5 is not as good as the Pentium D is very arguable. The two processors are in the same class as each other, to the point where saying either one of them is "faster" is misleading at best. You have to be very specific about what "faster" means in order to have an honest comparison. Anything else is simply a lie.
And as to the prices you say that Apple "has to" have. I think that Apple's continued existence over the last few decades means that they have a good idea what they "have to" do. And if you look at products that are comparable (and I challenge you to find a product that is comparable to the Mac mini... remember size is a real feature) I think that your illusions of Mac's being significantly more expensive disappear.