Backwards Macs - farewelling the power tower

Mac Pro - eight cores of Xeon glory.

Recently, I sent a Mac Pro tower back to Apple. The massive aluminium powerhouse had eight cores (in the form of two Quad Core Intel Xeons) running at 2.26GHz and 6GB of RAM. The video card was an NVIDIA GeForce GT 120.

I had the Mac Pro to review, and then in turn I reviewed OS X 10.6 Server on it. I really like Mac Pro towers – all that power, the big RAM capacity, the multiple hot-pluggable drive bays ... so I have to admit I was pretty much dreading going back to my lowly 15-inch MacBook Pro.

It's already three years old, so it has the older battery tech – this battery only lasts a couple of hours. It has the older squarer, heavier and thicker case design and it's seen a lot of wear and tear, as it's my presenter machine and I use it for training. Plus it's weathered several recording sessions in the hands of my daughter and her teenage band (using Garageband and Logic).

With some trepidation, I set up my old work station configuration – MacBook Pro on the right, with another screen (22-inch ViewSonic) ahead of me, and my old Apple keyboard plugged in.

Immediately, I was happier than I thought I'd be. I've used two monitors for years – it was great in the magazine industry for big layouts – colour critical monitor on one side for honing images, big monitor on the other for double-page spreads.

Many Macs have supported this function out-of-the-box going back at least 15 years, and I often did it later on with iMacs, too, as I like two screens so much.

For the record, I actually prefer two monitors to one massive one.
But now I can happily put my news feeds on the 15-inch monitor while I create my daily mac-nz postings on the 22 again.

But now I have just two cores, running 2.2GHz, and the machine has its maximum of 4GB RAM … I thought I'd hate it. Especially in Final Cut Pro, Logic and, ahem, for Call of Duty 4, my only game addiction. After all, it's slow, it only has an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT video card with 128MB VRAM. The Mac Pro's card had 512MB of video RAM.

But once again, I was pleasantly surprised. Call of Duty 4 runs fine, actually, and I don't miss the extended depth-of-field and heat-haze effects the tower gave me. I am easily able to cope with slight speed decline in Logic and Final Cut, although I suspect any disparity would be more extreme with more complex projects. The only thing I find really hard to cope with is the 5400rpm speed of the internal drive in FCP, which leads (I think) to a slight halt in playback between clips.

So, sure, I'd like a newer MacBook Pro. Mainly for its slight weight saving, its slimmer, more packable design, faster processor, and, definitely, for the longer battery life.

But I am happy to report my old MacBook Pro 15 is, for all intents and purposes, perfectly fine.

I have a handy and usable desktop system, plus I love being able to shut down the MBP15, disconnect everything, chuck it in my bag and take off to train, interview or present.

Meanwhile, my partner is struggling with her five-year-old 20-inch while poly iMac. Considering she's an artist and makes up to 3-metres-wide photo composites in Photoshop to such an accuracy that no one can tell they are composites, it's really time she moved up. I feel sorry for her … unfortunately, the bank does not share our remorse.

And worst, my 17-year-old is bereft and forlorn, as now she has no computer to pretend is hers. I did offer her the 9-year-old Cube, but she's not keen. It works perfectly, mind you, and sure looks great, but it's just no good any more for anything but email and a little web browsing.

Actually, when I think about it, my daughter is a perfect candidate for an iPad, apart from it can't record music (but she could borrow the 15-inch for that). She doesn't type much beyond the occasional assignment; the most typing she does is on Facebook, and she could easily cope with that on an iPad's virtual keyboard. And assignments – well, we have a MacBook Pro and an old iMac available.

By the way, you probably know by now that the iPad is on sale in the US from April 3rd, while a few other countries, including Australia, will get their iPads 'later in April'.

However, Apple NZ (which is run from Apple Australia) has no information about when NZ might get it.

You can register your ideas about this by taking the mac.nz poll I put up - five lucky pollsters drawn at random will win sachets of Cyber Clean thanks to Cyber Clean NZ Ltd.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com