Michael Kratz

Last week at WWDC2006, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the replacement of the Apple Power Macintosh G5 with the Mac Pro (as if we didn’t see that one coming!). Personally I think this machine is going to proove quite popular, not just because its ‘new’, and not just because its now on Intel like the rest of the Apple lineup. Rather because it looks like Apple have actually listened to their customers and nailed a lot of the issues which were prevalent in the G5, whilst also dropping the price and increasing value. Ars made mention of this in their very recent (you may not have seen it yet) review of the Mac Pro.

I’m quite surprised by the price, here in Australia the bog standard Mac Pro is $3,999, thats only $500 more than what I paid for my shiny new PC a couple of months ago! I find that to be fairly reasonable for the top end Mac. I think one of the things that a lot of people forget when they look at the top end Mac is that it has dual processors (not just dual cores), and thats certainly going to add a bit to the price. That said, the Mac Pro does only come with 1GB of RAM, I’ve got 2GB in my new PC, and I really think that Apple should have pulled their socks up and stuck 2GB in the new Mac Pro.

In my opinion, RAM is the one thing Apple has always skimped on. Mac OS X is pretty good at managing its memory (thanks to the Unix backend) and it will run just fine with 1GB, however if you throw a couple of gigs at it, it really makes a difference when you start multitasking. In today’s multitasking, memory hungry environment I personally think that 1GB of RAM should be the bare minimum (i.e. not even considered for what is Apple’s top of the line machine). When I bought my new PC I spec’d it with 2GB of RAM, and my work MacBook Pro is also spec’d with 2GB of RAM.

Okay, so lets option the Mac Pro up with 2GB of RAM, now we’re up to $4,498 and $1,000 over the cost of my new PC. I’d also option down to the 2GHz CPUs from the 2.66′s because my current PC only has a single 2Ghz Opteron 170, that brings the price funnily enough, back down to the original $3,999. Now Apple only offer choices of 250GB or 500GB hard disk drives, well, I’ve got a 320GB Seagate 7200.10 (16MB cache) in my new PC, so I’ll leave the Mac Pro spec’d with the 250GB drive.

So what else is different, there’s the NVIDIA 7300GT in the Mac, I’ve got an X1800 GTO in my PC. I honestly have no idea how they compare!, so lets just say they’re about equal. The only other significant difference left (that I can think of) is the sound, I don’t know what sound hardware Apple use in the Mac Pro, but I’ve got a SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum in my new PC. I think the X-Fi is probably going to better the Apple audio solution, especially for gaming, but again I’m not 100% sure.

So where am I going with all of this… well, I just recently bought myself a fairly grunty new PC for home, my first real upgrade in 6 years, and now this Mac Pro has come out. I find myself asking the question, would I have bought one of these had I not just purchased a PC! and what is my answer… probably not. After breaking down some of the hardware specs, it becomes apparent that the Mac Pro is still fairly expensive when compared to a PC. However, the Mac Pro will now run Windows, and it is a great deal better value than its predecessor, so it is close, but not quite there.

Reality is, my personal minimum spec Mac Pro would cost $3,999. $500 more than my PC, then I’d have to add to that a copy of Windows (yes, I’d still need to run Windows) and I’d still be 120GB of storage space short. Given that, I don’t think that I would buy a Mac Pro in its current form, it’s still just a bit too expensive. But by the time my next upgrade comes around, well… we’ll see. I think that by then, possibly in another 5 or 6 years, Apple will come out in front. Don’t get me wrong, if I didn’t have my new PC right now, I’d be very seriously thinking about it, despite what I’ve written above. But, looking at it now, and comparing it with my new PC, put it this way, I’m not disappointed I bought my PC when I did.

For those interested heres my PC specs:

• AMD Opteron 170 (socket 939)
• Gigabyte K8-NF9 Ultra Motherboard
• 2GB Corsair Twin-X DDR SDRAM
• 320GB Seagate 7200.10 SATA II Hard Drive
• Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum
• Powercolor ATI Radeon X1800 GTO
• Antec Neo HE 550W Power Supply
• Zalman 9500CNPS CPU Heatsink
• Lian-Li PC-V1000 Case (yes, the one which looks like a Mac!)
• Pioneer DVR-111D Black DVD R/W Drive
• Windows XP Pro