Which Mac?
Think I’ll probably be buying myself a new Mac in the next few months. The question, of course, is “which one?”. It was fairly simple — Macbook Pro because it’s not as insanely expensive as the Mac Pro but it has a real GPU — but the recent iMac refresh made that more complicated by giving the iMac a real GPU option at the top end.
A bit of poking at the Apple Store, though, shows that one can spec a Mac Pro for similar money to the top-end iMac. That’d be a quad-core 2.8GHz Xeon, 2GB RAM, and an 8800GT for graphics compared to a dual-core 3.0GHz Core2 Duo, 4GB RAM, and an 8800GS. The iMac provides the big shiny screen, the Mac Pro provides double the CPU cores and plenty of room for more disks.
Right now the Mac Pro is appealing a lot. Four cores and a few hundred extra dollars on RAM would let me run an XP VM in the background that would be pretty much unnoticable. It’d also be able to take over “house server” type duties, effectively condensing three machines into one. There’s a 300GB SATA disk in my current game machine which could go in a Mac Pro for Time Machine purposes, and there’s a 300GB ATAPI disk in the server that could go into the gametoy, which could then be donated to a not-for-profit.
As much as a laptop appeals in other ways, my vision is such that I’d rarely use it as one, and it’s not really suitable to take over the “house server” type tasks. And my eye doesn’t really agree so much with the current iMac displays either so if I bought one of those it’d probably wind up hooked to the current display anyway.
Ah well. This time last year I was sure I was about to buy an MBP…
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