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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I’ve just installed VMware Fusion and am running a Debian machine in there with little impact on the MBP (which isn’t specced like your plans) and it works like a charm!
I like the MacPro — and thus actually bought one.
Dual quadcore 2.8, 2G when I bought it (soon upgraded to 6), put in a couple extra drives, hooked it up to a pair of screens. Love it, parallels and vmware run fast.
For portable duty I have a Macbook black dualcore — the 50 euro premium for black is IMO well worth it considering it doesn’t show dirt and smudges nearly as easily. I currently use that as my primary workstation on the job. With 4G ram even that is well up to running virtualization. 2G was dreadfully slow.
MBP is nice equipment, had that at my last employer. When I bought the MB I was looking for something light and portable that I wouldn’t mind having in a backpack if I had to run across an airport, or throw in the topcase on the bike. Not that much advantage over the MB except bigger screen and expresscard slot.
iMac, well, lets just say I like being able to change screens and systems independently. Currently using a pair of 17″ that have been attached to three different hosts; now that 21″ with a decent resolution are starting to become cheap I’ll probably upgrade to a pair of 21/22″ soon, which will then likely see another two or three hosts. Heck, in a year or two might upgrade to 1080p beamer or pair thereof.
Considering your vision I’d be somewhat reluctant to recommend laptops unless you’re actually planning to use them as such; so down to MP or iM. Or wait a while until they upgrade the mini — it’s by far the oldest system in the lineup now, and they recently dropped pricing here so wouldn’t be too surprised if an updated one of those showed up before too long? Still, for house server duty and serious workstation I’d look good at the MP — upgrade to 6 or 10 G, throw in another 2T of disk (3*750) and you’ve got yourself a very nice system that’s still reasonably quiet.