What price a core of Apple?

Apple Mac Pro desktop.

I now have on my desk a magnificent, purring tower. A new Mac Pro. It's a visual statement. It's also a weightlifting statement, getting it out of the box. I'm glad Apple chose recyclable aluminium for its case construction instead of recyclable iron ...

It seems a shame to have it driving a rather ugly Viewsonic 1680x1050 LCD, but that's what I had handy, so hey, it works and the quality is fine.

Here's a quick look at how this thing performs.

Cinebench tests

MacBook Pro 13-inch July 2009, OS 10.5.7, 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M Graphics Card

One-CPU render 2879
Multiple-CPU render 5489
Open GL 4661
Multi-processor advantage 1.91 times
(Current price of this Mac on the NZ Apple Store: $2599)

iMac 21.5-inch late 2009 iMac, OS 10.6.1, 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9400 graphics card

One-CPU render 3474
Multiple-CPU render 6390
OpenGL 4913
Multi-processor speedup 1.84 times
(Current price of this Mac on the NZ Apple Store: $1999)

Mac Pro, mid 2009, OS 10.6.2, 2x2.6GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 'Nehalem' processors (8-core), 6GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 graphics card.

One-CPU render 3147*
Multiple-CPU render 20,100**
OpenGL 4913
Multi-processor advantage 6.39 times
*Slower than the two consumer Macs, but it is a slower processor
** Woa!
(Current price of this Mac on the NZ Apple Store: $7299)

Cinebench is multi-platform. In other words, you can download it free and run the versions for your Unix or Windows' boxes. So why don't you? And tell us in the comments. Get it from Maxon, its German creator.

I'm not 100% convinced by the efficacy of the Cinebench tests though, since when I restarted the Pro in 64-bit mode, Cinebench seemed to still run the tests in 32-bits. Anyway, the results were virtually identical.

Also, Cinebench reported the GHz of the processors as 2.4GHz when they are 2.26GHz, and it reported that the Pro had 16 processors!
What about costs? It makes sense to compare Apples with Apples.

Apparently you can get 100x faster PCs for 10% of the price. Or something. Although that might have been inflatulated ...

Just to be creative, if you divide the price of a Mac by the number of cores, which I know doesn't stack up logically in any way, shape or form because it discounts hardware differences like RAM, hard drives and all those system bus things and all that other (tech-speak) stuff, you pay per core, for the MacBook Pro 13-inch, NZ$1299.50.

For each iMac 21.5-inch core, it costs you $999.50. For both of these, of course, you get a monitor thrown in. You pay $1216 for the Mac Pro's Nehalem cores. Bang for buck, the best deal is that 3.06GHz iMac core.

On the Pro, for that money, apart from the stonkin' great case, you get Snow Leopard thrown in, as with any new Mac, and its iLife suite of the latest versions of GarageBand, iPhoto, iWeb, iMovie and iDVD, which let you make music, look after and edit up to 250,000 photos, make websites and edit and finish movies then burn them to DVDs.

But yeah, all of that is standard Apple excellence as sold with any Mac.

You also get Apple's wired slimline keyboard complete with the numeric section and the page-up/down etc and arrow panel. I much prefer having this keyboard. In this instance, the included mouse was the Mighty Mouse, not the new Magic Mouse, but I heretically plugged in my old Microsoft laptop mouse, anyway, which I prefer to the Mighty.

I love the insides of these, too. I once met an engineer for General Motors, great guy, who was also a Mac fan. He told me he had a good look at his first Mac, way back when, and was quite impressed.

The selling point, however, was when he cracked the case and saw how well designed and laid out everything else was, too. That certainly impressed the engineer in him.

Nowadays, this may be true of all computers (I'd certainly hope so), but back then it sure wasn't.

Anyway, this newish Mac Pro has the same quick-remove right-side panel all these aluminium case Pros have had. You can just slide out the processor tray to add more RAM. The hard drive bays slide out too, so pretty much any operator can add whack more storage in (up to 4TB internally).

Moving a bar lets change up to four expansion cards at once. The Mac Pro graphics card already has two display ports standard. A Mini DisplayPort connects the new 24-inch Apple LED Cinema Display with ease while the dual-link DVI port connects a 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display (or any other DVI display).

If you really need screen real estate, expansion is where it's at - you can add up to four NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 cards to connect up to eight displays if you really really want to.

I also like the way most of the ports are on the back, but there's a handy audio-out, two USB2 ports and two FireWire 800 port son the front, for connecting devices as you need them, for downloading video, for example, or whacking in a thumb drive without having to mess around on the back.

All in all, this thing is designed as an expensive workstation to do expensive jobs while letting you expansively (and expensively) pump up its specs and capabilities at any time with the greatest of ease.
How about a subjective view? I love this Mac. Of the five or so Macs I've had time with in the last 12 months, this is the one I'd like to keep the most. I love it.

But the writing is on the wall for the next model Mac Pro already, with the latest chip developments at Intel. So some time next year ...

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com