A new Mac Pro is long overdue, and I need one. Lightroom’s too slow on my vintage 2007 MacBook, and more importantly Warcraft is only giving me about 5 FPS. :-) If the new machine is fast enough, maybe I could even use Parallels\/VMWare\/Bootcamp instead of my Windows 7 desktop PC (which clocks 60 FPS in WoW without breathing hard). Maybe Apple will release new models tomorrow? If it does, I want to compare it to today’s prices, so if I bought today behind door #1 we have:
\n<\/p>\n
Specifications
\nOne 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
\n8GB (4x2GB)
\n640GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb\/s
\nATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
\nOne 18x SuperDrive
\nApple Magic Mouse
\nApple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (English) and User’s Guide
\nAirPort Extreme Wi-Fi Card with 802.11n
\n$3,019 before taxes and discounts<\/p>\n
I would likely add at least two more third party hard drives to this, one 2 TB internal and one smallish SSD drive. Do I need more memory? 4GB is not cutting it. Will 8GB be enough? Should I just configure with the minimum and then buy 3rd party RAM? RamJet has 16GB for $575.99, way below Apple’s price.<\/p>\n
Behind door #2, we have the same system but with eight 2.26GHz cores instead of 4 2.66GHz cores for about $3619. Which is likely to perform better, especially for Lightroom?<\/p>\n
Behind door #3, we have the same system but with eight 2.66GHz cores for $5,069.00. This is over my budget, but maybe tomorrow it won’t be?<\/p>\n
Behind door #4, we have the same system but with eight 2.93GHz cores for $6,269.00. This is way over my budget.<\/p>\n
Behind door #5 is a quad core 3.33GHz system for $4,219.00. If raw CPU speed is what I need, this is the best I can do.<\/p>\n
Finally, behind door #6 is something completely different, a 15″ MacBook Pro:<\/p>\n
2.66GHz Intel Core i7
\n8GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 2x4GB
\n512GB Solid State Drive
\nSuperDrive 8x (DVD\u00c2\u00b1R DL\/DVD\u00c2\u00b1RW\/CD-RW)
\nMacBook Pro 15-inch Hi-Res Glossy Widescreen Display
\nBacklit Keyboard (English) & User’s Guide<\/p>\n
The big advantage here is that I could then sell my MacBook to offset some of the cost since I don’t need two laptops. On the other hand, I do prefer a smaller laptop when travelling. I could even drop down to the 13″ model but I really want to max out the CPU. Would this system be fast enough to suit me? I don’t know. Certainly it should be faster than the 2007 vintage MacBook I’m using now. But I really want a system that has as close to zero delay as possible when moving between images in Lightroom. Are today’s MacBook Pros fast enough to deliver that? Even when the images are stored on an external Firewire drive? If not, then I’d be happier with a Mac Pro. Three critical questions I don’t know the answer to:<\/p>\n
Still I have a feeling that even if I go with a Mac Pro tomorrow, it may be the last desktop I ever buy. There is a point at which a faster system just doesn’t matter, and even for heavy RAW file processing today’s systems are getting close. Video can still suck up a few more generations of hardware, but I think we’re nearly topped out on photo editing performance. Hard to believe I can remember times when Macs had special add-on cards just to do JPEG compression! In 2010 poor computer responsiveness is almost always the result of really bad programming that fails to take proper advantage of available CPU, rather than wimpy hardware.<\/p>\n
Update: 8:08 AM EDT and the Apple Store is down. Looks like something is coming. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A new Mac Pro is long overdue, and I need one. Lightroom’s too slow on my vintage 2007 MacBook, and more importantly Warcraft is only giving me about 5 FPS. :-) If the new machine is fast enough, maybe I could even use Parallels\/VMWare\/Bootcamp instead of my Windows 7 desktop PC (which clocks 60 FPS […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[401,320],"class_list":["post-1003351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mac","tag-mac","tag-mac-pro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1003351"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1003363,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003351\/revisions\/1003363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1003351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1003351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1003351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}