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(More customer reviews)I read a lot of reviews on here about how happy people were to move up from their PowerMac G5s but when I tried it at the store I didn't see what the big deal was about. My PowerMac is 6 years old and for the most part it runs really well. After using it for a couple of days I will have to restart it to keep it running fast but other than that I don't see why the MacPro is such a big upgrade. It has the same case as the PowerMac, Apple is no longer making adjustments to the case every year or two like they did with the PowerMac G4. You are basically spending a fortune to get the same exact case. For a premium price I would expect more.
The inside of the case is very different. It supports 4 hard drives instead of 2 however since you can now buy 2 terabyte hard drives you can fit a whopping 8 terabytes into the old PowerMacs which is adequate for most people. The advantage of the new MacPro is that you can put in solid state drive as an option. It will be very expensive but you are able to add 2 terabytes worth of solid state hard drives. The dual processor version can store 32 gigabytes of ram which is probably the biggest selling point of the machine. I max out the 8 gig limit on the PowerMac quite often. It makes me wonder how much ram I would be using if I could go beyond 8 gigs. With new programs taking better use of ram having over 8 gigs of ram will probably continue to get more important.
Now I can somewhat understand why there hasn't been huge updates to this machine. Apple has had a lot of market share success with iOS devices and I know they are working over time right now making iOS versions of Apple TV, notebooks and iMacs. It makes sense. But there are some things that would be very easy to add that they could have had time to add. I believe all the Macs have SD cards today but yet the biggest Mac, the one that has the most space to put a card reader still doesn't have this feature. This makes no sense to me. Also we still can't use the remote that all the other Macs currently use. I don't even know why MacPros come with Front Row, you can't even use it.
So to sum up this review after having a PowerMac for 6 years this new MacPro is a snoozer of an update. With no significant updates to either the hardware or the operating system why even bother?!?
PS Someone posted a comment after I wrote this telling me that the hardware was significantly different. And yes that is true it is a lot faster than a machine from 6 years ago at some things but what I meant was the case is has had no interesting advancements in 7-8 years. No over Mac has gone anywhere near that long and it's time for them to start innovating in this area. That is what I pay them a premium for. When I said that the operating system is the basically the same I was comparing 10.5 (the last PPC OS) to 10.6.
Some one else mentioned that all the current software is available only on Intel. I decided to go through all the programs I have on my computer and found the following have the newest versions available on the PowerPC:
iBank
Fontcase
Knapsack
Leap
Fresh
Deep
Divvy
Cinch
OmniFocus
Bento
Caffenine
Amazon MP3 Downloader
Flip4Mac
Disc Cover
RealPlayer
RealPlayer Converter
Corel Painter Essentials
Billings
Tweetie
Journler
MacJournal
Live Interior 3D
Missing Sync
Paperless
Omniweb
LittleSnapper
Labels & Addresses
OmniDazzle
OmniDiskSweeper
OmniOutliner
SelfControl
SketchUp
SuperDuper
Spyder 2 Pro
Things
VirusBarrier X6
TechTool Deluxe
Acrobat
Safari
Not a short list. Keep in mind this is just the software that is installed on my computer. This isn't a complete list of PowerPC software with the newest version available for PowerPC. Like I believe I already said the software that is Intel only isn't that important. Adobe CS5 is mostly a small update and the same can be said of Snow Leopard. Since there are so many features introduced in CS3 and CS4 there is no reason to buy CS5. There is nothing here that can even come close to justifying $3,500+.
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Product Description:
The new Mac Pro is the fastest, most powerful Mac ever. Its new Intel Xeon processors increase performance up to 1.5x, and advanced graphics processors deliver high-performance graphics. It can even be configured with up to 12 processor cores. You can add up to 32 GB of memory, four PCI Express expansion cards, and up to 8 TB of hard drive storage. And the Mac Pro includes built-in Wi-Fi and the Magic Mouse.
The Apple Mac Pro (see larger image).
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