Just to be clear, I still really enjoy having the Drobo. Aside from the relatively slow performance, the device fits my needs exactly. Mine's populated with four 750GB drives now and I anticipate throwing a couple 1.5TB units in when the prices drop. I am somewhat concerned about the 2TB logical volume limit in XP-32 though.

Crap firewire support and the 2TB maximum drive size is making me question jumping ship to Apple for good. It's too bad I can't get along with Vista or 64-bit versions of XP. Perhaps Windows 7 will make things better, but it seems unlikely.

I really wish the reviews for Mac + Drobo were more encouraging. If so, I could see myself possibly getting an iMac right now. If only there was a headless Mac between the Mini and the Mac Pro, my decision would be that much simpler. If OS X could run legally on my relatively high-spec Dell box, that would be a no-brainer.

Thank you! I've been dealing with the exact same issue. I'm interested in going with a Mac, but my driving motivation is a desire to do heavy video editing, which just doesn't seem doable on a Mini. But if I go with a Mac Pro, the build I'm looking at (with only very minor upgrades and RAM purchased elsewhere) is going to start me at around $3000. And there's no reason for me to get an iMac when I have a 30" monitor.

So Apple's got me. I'm currently saving up, selling off some unused electronics, and even cashing in some 20-30 year old savings bonds to get a computer. Apple Wins. Ugh.

...I'm still going to put Windows on it, though

*edit*
Thanks for these updates on your Drobo, Rob. I've been very interested in getting one for quite some time now, but the cost is always so prohibitive. Newegg has a pretty good deal right now though, I believe it's about $380 for the Drobo 2. The fan noise would indeed bother me, though. I have two Western Digital MyBooks, and they are utterly silent. Very impressive. But I also have about 5 random SATA drives floating around unused, and even if they're only 250-350GB, they'd still be usefull in a Drobo.

If the rumour sites are to be believed there is an update for the MacMini coming very soon. And the legal case is ongoing about using OS-X on non-Apple hardware.

I have had my own Drobo problems this week. When upgrading the Macbook to Leopard (finally!) I left the Drobo plugged in. Big mistake. The permissions got screwed and the drive got locked. It was quite simple to solve in the end, just a few commands in Terminal, but Drobo's technical support was totally and completely useless. That was a real surprise. All they basically told me was I shouldn't have left the drive plugged in while upgrading the OS. I had kinda figured that one by myself at that point!

Also, when I purchased the Drobo I was promised cashback. This hasn't turned up after over 3 months and their customer service is also quite shocking. It's a shame that such a well made product isn't getting backed up with service in line with the price they charge.

Still love it as a storage solution though.

Cheers

Cris.

If you believe the rumor sites, it still doesn't look like a very powerful machine. Still great as a regular day to day PC, or as a decent HTPC, but not much of a workhorse. There's still a huge gap between it and the Mac Pro.

And shouldn't the Mac Pro be getting an upgrade sometime? I know it's hard to predict Apple's releases, but it seems that the Pro is almost as ready for an upgrade as the Mini.

All the desktops will be getting updates within the next few months. Guaranteed.

I do agree however. They need another machine that's not quite so Server-Class. Perhaps something in a smaller case with specs closer to their old 4-core (lower end) desktops. Something in the iMac price range but without a display. Something I've mentioned in other threads, but I have no idea if on their radar.

Indeed. new iMac and Mac Mini machines using NVidia chipsets are already in the 10.5.6 drivers. It's just a matter of time now. The Mac Pro is probably waiting on the Core i7 based Xeons to come out.

Matt, if you do go with a Mac Pro, make sure you don't gimp it somehow like taking one of the processors off the order. When I bought mine last year, going from 2 2.8ghz chips down to one would have cut $500 off. The Xeon processor alone is at best ~$900 today, and then add in the price of having to get the heatsink for the system.

Oh I definitely wouldn't take one of them out. The only changes I made to the base configuration was basically upgrading the video card, which brings it to something like $2949.

And I would love to know who buys extra memory from Apple. Those are the most absurd prices I've ever seen from a legitimate retailer. Frankly I'm a bit appalled by them, and that makes me wonder about the price of the entire system. I expect a certain amount of "Apple tax," but $500 for 2GB of memory is robbery.

The same applies over at Dell too. Look up a Precision T7400. It's basically a system that you could spec out similar to the Mac Pro. 2GB to 4GB of RAM costs $460, and thats for slower 667 ram that has been out longer then the 800 mhz sticks the Mac Pro uses. In the end, the Mac Pro still beats Dell on their prices even as the system is now a year old.

OEM memory is almost universally expensive.

... Something vaguely cube-shaped perhaps?

I still sort-of want a cube, really just as an objet d'art like my Mac Plus. Trouble is, so does everybody else, and they still go for real money on Ebay.

Peter

My company has an account with Dell, and it's ridiculous the discounts we get off of their list prices.

For example, the most recent quote I got from them was for an E6500 laptop. The quote was $1598.75. The same system configured with their online tool today is $2450, minus $300 "instant savings". That's either a 25% or 35% discount, depending on how you count the "instant savings".

Same. The fanless operation is quite attractive as well.

Trying to read Steve Jobs's mind, I'd suggest that there won't be a new Mac Cube or anything like it. Otherwise, they would have done it years ago. Instead, His Steveness wants to sell you an iMac as the standard desktop machine, a Mac Pro if you really want serious crunchies, or a Mac mini if you're a cheap bastard. That's it. If they released something akin to the $1000-2000 consumer PC line, it would cannibalize sales of both the iMac *and* the Mac Pro.

Which is precisely what is pushing me toward getting a Hackintosh desktop of some sort once 10.6 comes out.

Well no one will have to wait much longer to find out what's down the pipe. March 24th is the date being rumored by the blogs for Apple's next press event. I got confirmation fro a couple of sources today at lunch that it's the likely date as well. The rumored machines sound about right and I can say with near certainty there won't be any new stand-alone displays.

If true, it's a shame. The new Mini, with its alleged MacBook-like video guts, should be able to drive a 30" monitor, and the new MacPro tower should be able to drive several of them. It would make an awful lot of sense for Apple to release a new 30" monitor much like their recent 24" model.

The new MacPro tower, again based on questionable rumor blogs, looks like it's going to follow the current recipe of using high-end Xeon-class parts. Once again, Apple passes up the "standard PC" hardware class, which is precisely what I need at home (i.e., one Core i7 processor with 8GB of RAM and internal 4 or 5-disk RAID should be about right for my anticipated needs; you could build that with beige-box PCs for half of what you'd spend to do it with a MacPro because the beige boxes can't do multiple processor sockets).

(And would it kill Apple to do a 30" iMac? If they made one, it could become our standard desktop machine at work.)

I just don't see a huge need for that many internal disks anymore, unless your doing really large video operations. In that case, a Mac Pro would probably be well worth the price in encode time decreases alone. With a NAS, you can get quite a bit of storage in a nice compact box to shove in a closet, with files easily accessible to any desktops or laptops on the network. And even going direct attached, you can get 1.5TB with a single drive for around $1/10GB.

I also went into a local Apple Store today to check out the new 17" MBP in person... I'm really considering picking one up sooner rather than later. I played with it for about 15 minutes, mostly trying different things with the trackpad and making sure it felt as natural as I need it to.

Decent, but it's going to take a little getting used versus the older style pads on PowerBooks. My main concern is that I seem to be able to double-click faster on the older style button, plus the strange feeling when putting two fingers down on the pad and then clicking with my thumb (feeling the movement on my fingers is the strange part).

My biggest concern at this point is something I've brought up before. Mac OS just doesn't have a system-wide font preference, so it's impossible, through any system UI, to change the default font size of the menu and standard application fonts. I can understand the difficulty associated with bumping the default app font because it would cause applications to break without also fully implementing a scalable UI. But providing a control to adjust the size of the menu font seems like a pretty basic thing to do.

I also haven't seen any Apple applications that let you change the size of their toolbar buttons. Sure, many of them have a Large/Small check-box in their "customize toolbar" sheet, but they don't really resize anything but the text labels (which I don't display on apps I'm familiar with). And then only every so slightly. Safari (4) doesn't even have that check-box at all. Nor the ability to toggle text labels - they're shown in the customize sheet, but not in actual use.

These concerns are brought up of course because the new 17" model features a 1920 display and my eyes aren't getting any more powerful.

Engadget has a couple rumors up saying we might here something as early as tomorrow. Usually it's hard to believe rumors about Apple, but they've had far more leaks in the past year or so than they used to.

I'll be interested what the release price of that Mac Pro ends up being. Probably something obscene. I don't suppose anyone might remember what happened price-wise when the current Mac Pro replaced the old one?

The current and old Mac Pro were the same price. And the PowerMac G5 before the Mac Pro was about the same price. Apple tends to stick to the same price for products, and will just upgrade the specs over time.

Well Apple's online store is down at the moment for "updates", so I guess we will see what the new models are shortly.

Cheers

Cris.

Well, the US store is back up and we have new macs. Base Mac Mini with two display outputs and superdrive in the $599 unit is tempting me.

The top end iMac has gone up to £1800, that isn't so tempting to me. It is nice to see if you take the VAT (15%) off that you end up with the same price as the US version.

I am not sure if the screens are LED back lit either, can't find anything on the specs so I guess not

For £100 I could get the base Mac Pro and stick with the 24" monitor I already have. Would I see much benefit in performance going for the Mac Pro?

Cheers

Cris.

Everything has been put up in Apple's store today. I'm not sure what Apple are thinking however, making these announcements at the same time as PMA and Cebit. Their coverage won't be as uninterrupted as it would have been the next week or even the week after.

There's some sweet pricing on a lower end 24" iMac configuration. Lower pricing on Mac Pros thanks to the availability of a single processor (quad core) version again.

Only the Mac Pro is Core i7; all the others (oddly, IMO) are still Core 2. If what you want to do with your Mac is CPU-bound (or, especially, memory-bandwidth-bound), then even the cheapest Mac Pro will significantly outperform even the 3.06GHz Imac: by 50% per core, if you believe Apple's benchmarks, and of course you get twice as many cores, plus hyperthreading.

This also means that the new Mac Pro tops my own threshold of "a computer needs to be three times as fast before it's worth upgrading", but actually maybe it's that rule of thumb that's now wrong, 'cos there still seems to be plenty of go in my current one.

Peter

All this talk of CPU performance really makes me wish Apple has a version of the 17" MBP with Intel's quad-core mobile chip in it. All while maintaining an 8 hour run-time of course.

It will mainly be Lightroom and Photoshop work to start with, but I am hoping that video editing will become a much bigger part of my work than it currently is. Certainly there will be an increase in outputting video content to HD, DVD and Web. All incoming video will now be in 1080p from my new 5D Mk II, so I guess it'll be high bandwidth to start with.

Other than the CPU performance, I like the idea of being able to add more HD space easily. To this point I haven't had a Mac than can do that (Mac Mini then my current MacBook).

I have rung Apple, they have given me a lot to think about. Both machines specced up there is an approx £200 gap between the 2. I have a pretty decent 24" display already so I wouldn't need to buy that, and it would give me great flexibility for the future. Hmmmmm not an easy decision! Either way it's a hell of a lot of money! But If I think about it the MacBook was the last computer I bought, and that was 3 years ago in May. Both prices included the APP scheme too, I thought an investment of that order was worth protecting to some degree, is it worth it in anyone's experience?

Cheers

Cris.

The previous Mac Pro was also available with only one CPU. It dropped the base price to $1999 from $2499. To get it, you had to do a BTO order, since Apple only offered one standard config.

To go 8 core now, there is a bit of a price jump. Last time around $2499 was 8, now it's just 4, and $3200 is the entry level 8 core price.


It looks like Apple is continuing to use mobile or Xeon processors, and skipping the desktop processors. The Core i7 mobile CPUs aren't due out until later this year, so that left Apple the choice of trying to migrate the iMacs over to desktop CPUs or waiting. This is more of a small incremental bump for now for the Mini and iMac over the previous models, mostly to bring in the same NVidia chipset transition the mobile computers just recently completed.

It's not an investment. It's an expense.

But given recent performance of real investments, it could outperform those!

Yeah, I was a little sad to see that. So they can say that it starts at the same price, but it doesn't really. Oddly, $2500 gets you one 2.66GHz, and the $3200 gets you two 2.26GHz (and 6GB of RAM instead of 3). So it's hard to tell how much more you're paying for that second CPU.

Also, continuing with the Apple memory prices we were talking about before, notice that now you can upgrade the memory in the Mac Pro at around $150 for 3GB. Just two days ago it was $500 for 2GB. Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled that they're finally selling for close to market value, but this makes me wonder why Apple went so long without adjusting their prices on the old Mac Pros.

Question for you good folks: How easy would you expect it to be to add a second processor to the single-CPU model? I can get a 2.66GHz Core i7 for a mere $289 on Newegg, but I don't know what kind of Apple hardware I'd need to put the chip in.

Not sure about the "middle generation" Mac Pros, but my "first generation" Mac Pro uses FB-DIMMs, which even on the open market are more expensive than the normal DDR3 ECC SDRAM DIMMs in the Nehalem Mac Pros (although by less of a margin than when they first came out).

Peter