It’s not all good news this, sorry to have to break that to you early on. Apple have updated their iMac and Mac Pro computers for 2010 / 2011 and they have an impressive specification and an equally impressive price tag. But it also looks like there’s a catch.
The new Mac Pros have six and 12-core monster Intel Xeon processors which is impressive, they also some with solid state hard disks and Apple say they’ll outperform the previous Mac Pros by up to 50%
So what’s the problem? I can’t help but think that Apple are painting themselves, rather badly, into a corner. The quad core Mac Pro will retail for about $2,499 and have 3Gb of RAM and some other stuff. It’s slow RAM though compared with some modern PCs and, dare I say this, what I bought for my own new PC only last month that’s double the speed and produced a machine about $1,000 cheaper for a similar spec and double the RAM.
It gets worse with the new 8 and 12 core Macs as upping the standard RAM to 6Gb and charging a whopping $3,499 for the privilege leaves the computer sitting in a place where it’s not properly prepared for the role it has to undertake.
You see, to get the best out of six, eight and twelve core processors these days, in fact to even get the spare cores working, you need to be doing some very serious work such as video editing, CAD or designing the next generation of fighter aircraft. What Apple have done though with pairing this processor with only 6Gb of RAM, and fairly slow RAM at that, is make it unsuitable for that role at the list price but also vastly overpowered for anything else. If you want one of these mothers you’re simply going to have to buy an upgrade and that’s just stealth pricing in my view.
The news for the new Core i3 iMacs is much rosier with the 21½” and 27″ models coming with 3.06GHZ and 3.2GHz processors respectively and faster memory, running at 1333MHz. Yet these models are a snip at only $1,199 and $1,699 respectively. They’ll look brilliant on your desk, do everything they’re designed and suited for brilliantly and have quality and appropriate components through and through.
This means these iMacs will, unlike the Mac Pro and the new Mac Mini compete far more effectively with their PC cousins and should be very successful as a result.
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how well would those mac pro’s do for virtual machines?
the slow ram would bottleneck the system but the 12 cores would benefit it greatly as would the SSD
I’d rather build my own Hackintosh If I wanted to run OSx. Overpriced machines for Mac lovers, that’s what apple sells.
I tend to think Mac users are pretentious snobs, but chacun & all that. I did email this to some confirmed Apple users, so thanks for it.
iMac prices increased a lot in Portugal. This is probably due to the change in the exchange rate. Still, while before the iMac was a little overpriced but still competitive enough, now is too expensive…