It looks like had Apple announced a new Mac Pro, click here to see for your self.  It’s been, what, 2 years?  I mean since Apple really updated the Mac Pro?  Here’s the basic gist of the upgrade, as I understand it now:  8 cores is now a part of the standard configuration, the architecture on everything from processors, to memory, to PCI cards, and even the case has been updated.  Apple is also offering us new graphics card options.

The following article is more or less part 2 of Upgrading the old Sound Studio and Media Studio.  So check that out for further reading.

The Mac Pro is the serious uncompromising work station Mac.  You don’t buy a Mac Pro unless you really need one..  well unless you have money to burn, these suckers are expensive after all!  That said they do have a longer shelf life then a portable, and are cheeper to upgrade then anything else on the Mac line… so it might be arguable that from certain perspectives the Mac Pro isn’t really as expensive as it seems on the surface, and not only that but.. if you do the sort of work that needs a hell of a lot of power, where the time it takes to complete computationally expensive tasks has a direct impact on how much work you can get done in X time period..  then obviously more power is cheaper then less power.

As it turns out I’m in the market for a new computer, so I’ve been researching Apples various offerings for the past month or so. Indeed I tend to know what’s going on with the Apple line even if I’m not in the market for one..  but.  I’ve more or less settled into the idea of buying a top of the like Mac Book Pro, and I’m waiting for Mac World (only days away) to make my final decision, just in case they something I might want gets updated.  Apple announcing prior to Mac World a Mac Pro update has me doing some new calculous, so lets take a little look at that calculous:

In terms of what I want Mac Pro kinda power for..  We are mainly talking about sound and video production, with maybe some motion graphics and possibly some 3D graphics thrown in for good measure.  It’s within the realm of possibility that I could end up going in a more video production orientated direction then I’m currently expecting, and so for these reason processor power and graphics power are kind of important to me.

When you buy a Mac Pro you generally custom configure it.  So the question is, what sorta custom configuration do I want?  Here’s the configuration I’d probably go with: 2.8  GHz, 2GB RAM.. The default configuration comes with a 320 GB hard drive that I’d probably stick with and just add more drives as I go along.  I say this though that 320 GB drive can be upgraded to a 500 GB drive for $100 is something I’d at least look at. On the Graphics card front I’m thinking the NVIDA GeForce 8800 GT with 512 MB of RAM, to say nothing of duel DVI, for an extra $200 is probably the way to go.  I’m not 100% sure about displays but I figure you gotta have a 32″ HD display.  The question is do you go through Apple or Dell?  Prices on 32″ HD displays seem to range from between $1,400 and $2000.. For our purposes lets say we go through Apple for $1,800.  Beyond this Apple has some printers that with rebates that can come to free or $30 or more.  Lets not add that to the bill at this time.. just for simplicity sake.  Finally, on a desktop unit I figure I don’t really need an Apple protection Plan..  

The final price is about $4,600.  This before I start updating software…  The Mac Book Pro on the other hand; with an updated hard drive, monitor resolution, Air Port Express Base station, and extended service agreement comes out to almost $3,600.  Is a Mac Pro worth $1000 more to me then the Mac Book Pro?  The price difference of $1000 can pretty much be attributed to the cost of the monitor.  I suppose it’s entirely reasonable that I could buy a monitor for the Mac Pro that costs $700 or less, making the Mac Pro cost equal or less then the Mac Book Pro.   Now lets look at some of the pros and cons:

Are the advantages of portability worth the power difference?  

What attracts me to portability is the following advantages: 

1.  You have a portable studio meaning I can go and do sound, or any other sorta work, anywhere.  This is pretty huge, and a mega plus for projects involving collaboration.
2. I can do live events.  If the events are DJ-ing, involve playing my guitar, playing a keyboard or using my studio, I can play out.  Also if I want to give presentations that require a computer with which to present off of..  I can do that.
3. Being able to work anywhere means I’m not stuck in this room anymore.. I can go down stairs, I can work in bed, I can work in a coffee house, on a plain, whatever.  (I know this is pretty close to #1 but it does seem different somehow)   

The advantages of the Pro: 

We are talking about a 30″ HD display on the Mac Pro versus the equivalent of a 23″ HD display on the Mac Book Pro.  On the Mac Pro we have both a better graphics card and twice the video RAM..  we have 8 2.8 GHz cores on two processors versus 2 2.4 GHz cores on 1 processor on the Mac Book Pro… And of course we can upgrade the RAM for relatively cheap on the Mac Pro.

It’s not totally clear to me what the performance differences between these 2 machines likely is. My guess is the stats of the Mac Pro make it sound a lot more powerful then it probably is in reality, depending on what your trying to do with it.  Or perhaps I should say it makes it seem like the performance difference between these computers is more then it likely is.  8 cores does not equal 4 times the performance of 2 cores, even if each of those 8 cores is marginally faster then your 2 cores.  The truth of the matter is the more cores you add the less per core performance gains you get, so when you get into the 8 core world you’re not really taking advantage of the extra power so much.  I say this even as both the processor architecture of the Mac Pro system has been revised and the new Leopard operating system takes better advantage of multi cores. The truth is that I don’t really know what the implications of these changes would mean in reality.

In the end I think you come out on the side of “well look, what do you want to do, and what are your values in this matter?”  Personally I’m sort of torn.  I know that many of the advantages of portability are critical to what I want to be doing in the next year or two, but I also like having a lot of power on my desktop, and I like the kind of productivity enhancement that such a system can offer.  When I think of the sorts of things I’m likely to use my computer for over the coming couple of years, I don’t see any reason why I can’t make do with the power of a Mac Book Pro.  

But as I say this a strange idea comes to mind.  What if I got a Mac Pro now, and then maybe a year or so down the line got some sort of Mac Book.. just a low end sorta portable?  In this case your talking about shit productivity, where an awful lot of the sorts of things you’d like to do you couldn’t really.. or you couldn’t do it well enough to make it worth doing on the portable.. but you could certainly use it for live performance stuff, internet stuff, and to a limited extent collaborative stuff.  Granted, $1099 is nothing to sneeze at, but you figure you’d want to upgrade your system in a couple years anyway..  

I guess what I’m trying to get at is there’s a lot of ways to look at this. 

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 1:05 am and is filed under Apple, Media Arts, Music Production, film making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.