KEY POINTS:
Apple has been maintaining its silence about possible new Macs. With the laptops all refreshed fairly fundamentally last October and then the 17-inch unibody MacBook Pro shown at Macworld in January, the Mac mini and the iMac are looking increasingly needy of some rejuvenation.
Meanwhile the Mac Pro tower hasn't been touched, in any significant way, for ages.
With Apple increasing the power of even the lowly white MacBook, giving it a decent video chip at last that can cope happily with games like Call of Duty 4, the divide between 'pro' and consumer Macs has lessened even more. This process has been ongoing since Apple put dual-core Intel chips into the all-in-one iMac line.
This has led to a dwindling justification for buying a Mac Pro. Once upon a time, for example, a publishing company might put an iMac on the reception desk and get a few MacBooks for some writers and account managers, but the designers would get Mac Pro towers and large monitors.
Nowadays, this happens less and less - it's fairly common for a media company to rock up to an Apple vendor and buy lots of iMacs in one go, then sprinkle them right across the company, from the lowliest trainee to the top designer. Even some recording studios have been eschewing Mac towers for iMacs, at least for some applications.
Since an iMac has either a 20 or a 24-inch screen built in, it certainly saves a lot of desk space. The cost - especially these days - is also compelling: one Mac Pro tower in the cheapest configuration costs NZ$4699. Impressive as the Pro's standard configuration is, it comes with keyboard and mouse of course, but you have to add a monitor.
Apple displays are more expensive than other LCDs it's true. You can calibrate a third party display to be a workable solution, if you know what you're doing and you have the equipment, but the Apple Cinema displays come calibrated for graphics out of the box.
If you're that style conscious, they look good next to your tower, but yes, you pay a premium for the privilege - $1049 for the 20-inch, $3198 for the 30-inch.
So now for a working high-end system that's Apple through and through, you're talking either $5748 for a standard 2.8GHz Mac Pro with a 20-inch Apple display or $7897 for the Pro with the Apple 30-inch.
Even the lowest priced option would net you three of the cheapest 20-inch iMacs ($1899 each) while the 20-inch option gives you the choice of two 24-inch iMacs running at 3.06HGz with $899 change for more RAM, hard drives or Wacom tablets.
All these processor cores might sound impressive, but not that many applications are harnessing multithreading very extensively - even Mac OS X Leopard isn't fully 64-bit yet, so unless you're doing lots of hard-out video or scientific processing, your eight cores aren't going to be working very hard.
The next Mac OS, Snow Leopard, should make this better ... but the point is, there's not all that much that the two cores in an iMac can't handle, compared to the eight of a Mac Pro. If you're in the market for high Mac processing power, you need to be aware of what power you actually require.
The whole thing with a pro Mac - except for the MacBook Pros until the latest models - is expandability. A Mac Pro has multiple, easily swappable drive bays, for instance, in it's brushed aluminium tower, and the side panel comes off in seconds to give you access.
The problem is that, despite their intentions, people don't upgrade their systems much, in my experience. The price of an external hard drive you can plug into any Mac is now, proportionally, quite close to one you can slide into a housing.
A few years ago the difference was more marked. In other words, whacking an external hard drive on your desk is no big deal and an easy way to expand storage capacity without taking the case apart. It has got to the point where if people want to seriously upgrade their Mac, they're thinking it's probably time to get a new one anyway.
What does all this mean? Is Apple moving away from pro hardware when even its heavyweight applications like Final Cut and Logic can run impressively on consumer iMacs?
Intel has been busy making new, faster processors and Apple has been very busy in R&D. I expect new iMacs and maybe minis in the next few months which, once again, will put them up in power and speed. So is Apple also planning an absolutely knock-'em-dead new Mac Pro to widen the performance gap considerably again? Who knows...
- Mark Webster mac.nz
