I'm not a Mac fanboy or anything, we have a mixture of PC and Mac devices at home, but I do love the look of the newly announced Mac Pro. It is totally unique in it's design and seems to be a powerful beastie. What concerns me though is the ability to upgrade. I'm not sure if I would buy one, but it would be a beautiful peice of kit sat on your desk, no?
Not impressed. It might look nice but that's not the point of a workstation. I've always been a believe of "Form follows function", however Apple seems to continually adopt the attitude "Form Form Form, and bugger the function".
It's not the device the pro mac users were looking for quite frankly. I'd call it a Mac Mini Pro, except for the fact the Mac Mini has more upgrade options.
Computers are for under the desk, not on them. Now you don't have to continually access them to get at the CD-ROM/floppy/tape drives, you might as well keep the desk space for coffee mugs, pot plants and an egregiously large screen.
For me, the workstation can look like Godzilla's ugly stepmother. I'll admit though, I'm not exactly Apple's target market
You can build that cheaper and better-looking and have more upgradeability if you do it yourself... Apple loves to build "pretty" things, but they're really just trapping you into their product/their system...
Besided I like this BMW-designed rig much better...
There's a reason Apple can command such a premium for their SFF systems.
I've got a Dell PC that I bought a bit before my 2008 iMac.
The only thing I upgraded on it was the RAM.
And swapping the 2*1 GB for 2*2GB was no problem on the iMac either.
Exchanging disks would be cheaper and easier on the Dell - but the system is too slow to make investing in an SSD worthwhile (it's not used as a desktop).
Fact is we Mac users don't have much of a choice other than to get the new Mac Pro. I've been waiting for about 2 years to get something bigger and better than my current Mac Pros, the 2012 offering was just insulting. I'm enthusiastic that the new toy will tick all the boxes when it arrives in fall.
In the meantime, daisy chaining several external HDs and using as many cloud based storage options as I can squeeze down the ethernet cable.
Say goodbye to self upgrading, even on next gen PCs this is going to get a lot harder, with many components including processors and ram soldered to the motherboard.
As for the Mac Pro, when I saw that design, I was hoping for Thunderbolt connectors underneath it, so OEMs can come up with cylinders full of disks/PCIe cards. That seems the obvious and "clean" way to extend it, just build a nice longer cylinder!
Nope, it just means that switching to another OS highly undesirable - believe me I've tried. Certain flavours of Linux have a lot of potential as they're almost as intuitive as the Mac, but Linux lacks the heavyweight software. Windows has the heavyweight software, but the OS in general just seems so convoluted that it gets in the way of what you want to do. I can use windows but it's bloody painful at times in comparison to either Linux or Mac OS.
There's also a problem if you use OS dependent software. While I do my best to keep everything in file formats that will work on any platform there are times where you end up having to use a proprietary format to retain certain formatting and processing. A graphic artist or photographer may find it very hard work switching from mac to windows in the same way an accountant would find it hard work switching from windows to mac due to software being used for their respective professions.
Is there anything that runs on Mac that you can't find on windows, or a viable alternative? I can see how you can be locked to windows, but would be surprised if the same applied to Mac.