All new MacPros are quads!!

[machinesworking]

I agree which is why in this case I matched every feature to the best of my ability. I even managed to spec better features on the Boxx and it still came out cheaper [RAID-0 for the system drives and a separate RAID-0 for data, instead of just buying drives]. And its all optimised for the work I would want to do with it, not just put together for a million different needs.

OK there must be some sort of mafia types in AU bumping Apple cost up there....
I just specced out a Boxx w/ the dual 3Ghz Xeon same 2GBRAM, cheapest graphics card, 500GB HD, 16X DVD RW, Logitech cordless mouse and keyboard........ $4,912

Same thing with the mac pro, except Apple wireless mighty mouse and keyboard at the same cost exactly... $4,786

If you upgrade to the one graphics card they both spec


Apple $6,436

Boxx $6,558

Subtle differences might be in the DVD RW drives, plus I added bluetooth and wireless internet/ethernet to the mac pro, and personally I like Logitech mice, I have a mx700 that I've thoroughly abused, with 7 buttons etc. Again, we cannot say if the Boxx RAM has heat sinks or not...

[keyman_sam]

Bones is just jealous of you mac guyz. He wishes that he had a mac, but he's too damn poor to afford it.

[machinesworking]

The AU retail store for Boxx, doesn't have the AU price for the 8300 model with the new Xeon CPU found in the mac pro yet.... correct me if I'm wrong... but H Digital are the AU distributors for Boxx according to the US webstore, and H Digital direct you back to the US store for details.... I even went as far as to sign in to the H Digital web store, no pricing yet. Can't buy....

[BONES]

I got my pricing from the BOXX US store's "international pricing" and converted it to Au$ at www.xe.com, as I explained earlier in the thread. I should also point out that the "H" in H-Digital stands for "Harry" and leave it to you to work out the rest.

When HD's are sold at a premium by these outfits, it seems like it's unreasonable to spec them in to me, especially when Apple doesn't allow you to buy any less than a 500, and you want a 320 that's easily picked up somewhere else. They all add a stupid tax to people who do this IMO.

This is the second time this has come up. How can you believe that they rip you off on HDD's and RAM but not on everything else? Its all a rip-off. I am probably misrepresenting myself here by using other proprietary vendors as examples but, as I've said many times in the past, I basically lump Apple in with IBM, Dell, HP and the rest, its just that the're at the top of the hit-list. I firmly believe that all proprietary systems are a rip-off and I know I can build a better PC for my needs for far less and have just as good an experience with it, in terms of reliability and support. Its mostly tha tApple has all teh same things against them, only in a much worse way. i.e. choice, configurability and value.

[pdxindy]

Why do we need a quad core, it's difficult enough to write software that can use all the power of a dual core (and balances out the cpu use to the two cores)?

Ahh, ye of such limited vision. Never say never. Back in the day the CEO at IBM once said something along the lines of "why would one ever need more than 1 mb of memory" The idea is the same, its not that we dont have use for it now, its so that IF we do need it, its there...

Ok, that's true, but for the moment, i don't want to pay for a quad core where some core will do nothing most of the time...

depending upon what you are doing, they will not be sitting there. 3d rendering, audio, video, these all make good use of all the processors if you have multi-processor capable software.

[keyman_sam]

I got my pricing from the BOXX US store's "international pricing" and converted it to Au$ at www.xe.com, as I explained earlier in the thread. I should also point out that the "H" in H-Digital stands for "Harry" and leave it to you to work out the rest.

When HD's are sold at a premium by these outfits, it seems like it's unreasonable to spec them in to me, especially when Apple doesn't allow you to buy any less than a 500, and you want a 320 that's easily picked up somewhere else. They all add a stupid tax to people who do this IMO.

This is the second time this has come up. How can you believe that they rip you off on HDD's and RAM but not on everything else? Its all a rip-off. I am probably misrepresenting myself here by using other proprietary vendors as examples but, as I've said many times in the past, I basically lump Apple in with IBM, Dell, HP and the rest, its just that the're at the top of the hit-list. I firmly believe that all proprietary systems are a rip-off and I know I can build a better PC for my needs for far less and have just as good an experience with it, in terms of reliability and support. Its mostly tha tApple has all teh same things against them, only in a much worse way. i.e. choice, configurability and value.

Yeah, all those companies trying to make some money....how COULd they? They just have to sell everything with either loss or no profit at all, right?

[pdxindy]

BONES: What DID happen to Shake? I've heard of that program, but never really knew what it does.

Apple bought it, droppped the price of the Mac version so it was chaper to be a Mac and Shake than a Shake license for either Windows or Linux, eventually cancelled the non-Apple ports, and have now effectively EOL'd the Apple port as well.

Basically they stripmined a competitor in the compositing market, then dumped the product.

That does not make sense when they have no other competing product. Shake is only EOL'ed because they are shipping a new app that is Shake with screen rendering offloaded to the GPU like Motion.

[pdxindy]

The acceptable practice is to round up if the value is equal or greater than .5. I belive both 2.7 and 3.6 qualify, particularly in the context of "3 or 4", which is precise only to within a tolerance of around 33% in the first place. Jesus H. Christ, how hard is it for you to add up!?!

The acceptable practice is to round to a value, or to place something in a range of values. Not do one, then the other.
Jesus H. Christ, how hard do you have to bullshit to try and avoid admitting you're wrong?

[pdxindy]

You are all aware that you can buy any serial ata drive and install it in a mac pro? I would never buy a HD from apple (because i do think it's overpriced....and yes i'm an apple user) I would ofcourse buy the mac pro with only one HD and buy another myself and put it in. It's as easy as in any pc. So what's the fuss all about?

it's easier, there are no screws...

[machinesworking]

I got my pricing from the BOXX US store's "international pricing" and converted it to Au$ at www.xe.com, as I explained earlier in the thread. I should also point out that the "H" in H-Digital stands for "Harry" and leave it to you to work out the rest.

When HD's are sold at a premium by these outfits, it seems like it's unreasonable to spec them in to me, especially when Apple doesn't allow you to buy any less than a 500, and you want a 320 that's easily picked up somewhere else. They all add a stupid tax to people who do this IMO.

This is the second time this has come up. How can you believe that they rip you off on HDD's and RAM but not on everything else? Its all a rip-off. I am probably misrepresenting myself here by using other proprietary vendors as examples but, as I've said many times in the past, I basically lump Apple in with IBM, Dell, HP and the rest, its just that the're at the top of the hit-list. I firmly believe that all proprietary systems are a rip-off and I know I can build a better PC for my needs for far less and have just as good an experience with it, in terms of reliability and support. Its mostly tha tApple has all teh same things against them, only in a much worse way. i.e. choice, configurability and value.

look at the specs, HP is selling 500GB HD's for $200 more, Apple's main offense is in overpriced RAM, that you can buy for cheaper third party.
You want to argue that roll your own PC's are the shit, and I have no problem with that, it's definitely the best part about PC's IMO, but you've been arguing that the major brands are better than Apple, and in many ways that's simply not true. Apple do a pretty decent job of competing now that the chipset is the same, a lot better than I thought they would.

[BONES]

Yeah, all those companies trying to make some money....how COULd they? They just have to sell everything with either loss or no profit at all, right?

So you buy from them just so that they can continue to live in the manner to which they have become accustomed? That is the dumbest f**king thing I've read on this thread. Does that mean you always go with the worst value propsotion on the assumption that those guys need your money more than the others?

That does not make sense when they have no other competing product. Shake is only EOL'ed because they are shipping a new app that is Shake with screen rendering offloaded to the GPU like Motion.

That is incorrect. That might be what they want you to believe but think about it, most pundits think it will be a couple of years before this new product sees the light of day. Its already more than a year since Shake's last upgrade [4.1 is just universal binary for Mac]. They have also offerred the source code for sale to any of their customers who want it. That gives their competitors two years to completely displace them from a market which mostly used Shake because it was the least bad option, not because it was actually really good for what it was used for. We now have a revolutionary new product and their other main competitor has a completely rewritten version, how many people are going to wait around for two years in the hope that Apple deliver something useful to them while all their competitors are getting on the bandwagons of other great new products? Whe nApple releases Phenomenon the Shake market will be a distant memory within the industry. Anyway, we're talking visual effects for film here, currently 2k imagaes at a bit-depth of 8bits-per-pixel. By the time their new product appears the industry will be working at 4k, in stereo at HDRI bit-depth. Right now Toxik, my product, can store one frame of paint-strokes for a 4k image with 256Mb of graphics RAM [we use the graphics card for accellerated interaction for painting]. Toxik is without doubt the most advanced product in this field, from a company that has a history of great innovation and a portfolio of GPU-based visual effects solutions. We have dismissed GPU rendering as impractical for the kind of work we've built Toxik for at every stage. Its great for improving interaction with the user but at render time you want quality, not speed. So if they do go down the GPU track I am prety sure it won't be a product that can replace Shake.
Apple knew they couldn't compete and, in the end, they weren't interested in trying. Instead they just dropped a hand-grenade in the room as they walked out the door.

You are all aware that you can buy any serial ata drive and install it in a mac pro? I would never buy a HD from apple (because i do think it's overpriced....and yes i'm an apple user) I would ofcourse buy the mac pro with only one HD and buy another myself and put it in. It's as easy as in any pc. So what's the fuss all about?

it's easier, there are no screws...

No screws in an HP workstation either.

but you've been arguing that the major brands are better than Apple, and in many ways that's simply not true. Apple do a pretty decent job of competing now that the chipset is the same, a lot better than I thought they would.

But only in a very narrowly construed way, as I said. They don't offer anywhere near enough choice. Only one QuadroFX card, the most expensive, when I can get the performance I need from any QuadroFX card but not from any other card. So they force me to buy a $2000 graphics card that is 10 times more than I need and there is no way around it. For f**k's sake, they force me to buy a quad-core workstation when I might only need a decent dual-core. From the narrowness of their range you would think they were just a boutique vendor, I bet someone like NEC has more configurable workstations. The fact that they close everything up really should put the onus on them to provide some decent variety, especially as nVidia's PC drivers are universal across all Quadro cards. Maybe Apple just aren't smart enough to write MacOS drivers that are as flexible?

[keyman_sam]

Yeah, all those companies trying to make some money....how COULd they? They just have to sell everything with either loss or no profit at all, right?

So you buy from them just so that they can continue to live in the manner to which they have become accustomed? That is the dumbest f**king thing I've read on this thread. Does that mean you always go with the worst value propsotion on the assumption that those guys need your money more than the others?

No. There are people who cant build PCs. People who are accustomed to other things, but not in the technical side. The world is filled with the majority of people like those. For them, it makes sense to get a "already-built" PC. If they had to build on their own, they wouldnt know what to get and how to get it and how to put it together. No, they're not dumb. They're just technologically-challenged.

For those people, companies like dell put together a PC and sell them. The incentive is more money. If you can build a PC, then fine. Build it and shut the f**k up.


And yes, companies are there to make money. If not, you first quit your f**king job because you're helping too. Idiot.

[pdxindy]

Apple do a pretty decent job of competing now that the chipset is the same, a lot better than I thought they would.

Blind Mac haters (bones), like Blind Mac zealots, have to prove their point at all costs. Doesn't matter that countless professionals accomplish beautiful, top quality creative work with Macs, they are all just assholes and idiots.

[BONES]

I am not a Mac hater, I use them happily when I have to. If someone could show me why they make a valid choice I'd be happy as Larry. In fact when averyone started say ing how competitively priced te new MacBooks were I thought nothing of it. it wasn't until I looked for myself and found out that they were anything but that I got involved in this at all. And after three threads and maybe 30 pages I am still yet to see evidence, across a broad base, to the contrary. Sure, there are very specific cases where you can buy an Apple computer at a comparable price to another brand but overall its just so far from reality that it isn't funny.

[BONES]

OK, here's a test for you. Build me an Apple computer, I don't care where you get what, that can compete with my new Shuttle SN27P2:

AMD Athlon64 X2 5000 dual-core CPU [dunno the clock-speed]
2Gb DDR2 RAM @ 800MHz
System drive + JBOD array for data storage [2 x SATA, 320Gb each]
QuadroFX 540 graphics for best 2D drawing performance and solid OpenGL 2 support

What is the minimum amount of money you would have to spend to match those features? I'll price it at an on-line store that you can all check, you guys do the same. In fact I'll price mine with a QuadroFX 1400 because you can get those with an HP workstation as well so its a little fairer. We'll go for a 3 year on-site warranty, parts and labour.