New MacBook Pros are Cheaper, Faster, Pro-er

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[citation][nom]rsud[/nom]Hey, thanks for being the one to finally pickup on my lure to flame here... Came quicker than I expected !I've observed in every apple article how winheads can only look at specs to gauge value. Its like rating a resturant by how much food they pile on your plate.[/citation]

The problem that mac fan boys like you have is that the basis of your argument does not justify the reality of the price. I am familiar with OSX,windows and linux (mint,fedora and ubuntu)and i have been buildng computers for a while now and the difference is clear, osx does not impress me that much,it is a great OS and in many ways better than windows but it is not worth an extra 1000 dollars regardless of how fan boys rant about the "mac experience" especially considering the fact that i am fine with windows. The only real benefit i see in it is the lack of viruses but then again i have not had a virus on my windows system in years (more often than not it is the stupidity of the user that leads to viruses not the OS) and linux does not get viruses either,1500 dollars would build me a nice AM3 955 rig with the 4870 and two hard drives,and i can get a nice i7 rig within that price range as well with at least the 4850 as a gpu and sam amount of drives and 6 gigs of ddr 3 ram at 1333 mhz. It is not about how much power but about advantage,why should i spend 2500 on a desktop that comes with a sigle 2.6 ghz cpu and the shitty gt120 and just one hard drive? is osx worth an extra 1000 dollars when windows is still capable of doing more stuff? (games and more compatibilty with third party produtcs).....for 1500 dollars i can get a machine that would play crysis on high settings and provide me with all the hardware i need for heavy and demanding work yet you would pay 2500 dollars for a desktop that comes with a regular nehalem xeon and that shit called gt120? why? just so you ca say you have a mac? or is the osx dock worth that much? seriously dude.
 
BTW why is everyone so damn angry? Mac's are a luxury, you don't buy em because they are the best choice economically. I like them and I've used PC's since my 386sx, no point in being bitter against more choices.

I would never buy a brand new car at this point but that's not to say buying a new car is the worst idea in the world... get over it. They make quality products and charge a premium and that is their business model.

Who cares... do you really think that your girlfriends coach purse is really worth 300+ dollars for some fabric and leather? come on now...
 
[citation][nom]mitzz[/nom]God I swear this site should disable comments for anything apple related since all it turns into is a mac bashing fest. Are we really still in the 5th grade where we go around a kicking the shin's of the kids that look different?[/citation]

though it is worth mentioning that the lack of 64-bit cs4 in osx is entirely apple's fault, they originally planned to release a 64-bit binary for carbon (?) and coco, but later decided to just release 64-bit support for the newer of the two, and most of osx photoshop plugins were in the older version and it didn't leave them with enough time for a re-write of them all without delaying the osx version

my stance with macs is still: I'd like to have one (and dual-boot with bootcamp) but apple just doesn't make it an option for me
 
[citation][nom]norbs[/nom]BTW why is everyone so damn angry? Mac's are a luxury, you don't buy em because they are the best choice economically. I like them and I've used PC's since my 386sx, no point in being bitter against more choices. I would never buy a brand new car at this point but that's not to say buying a new car is the worst idea in the world... get over it. They make quality products and charge a premium and that is their business model. Who cares... do you really think that your girlfriends coach purse is really worth 300+ dollars for some fabric and leather? come on now...[/citation]
I agree with you norbs,apple is targeting a particular niche and their pricing shows that however my problem is not the comany but the users and their attitude, i have heard all kinds of nonsense from apple fan boys and after a while it simply got to irritating,once i saw a mac head trying to argue that his macbook pro would be better than a sager notebook with the gtx 260m (note that all macbookpros come with the 9600m gt) simply because it cost more, even though the sager came with a better cpu,better ram and faster drive....we argue based on facts mac fan boys and fan girls argue based on rhetoric. If you wanna spend more to look cool fine but don't come to those who know better and tell them you have a better product simply because you got suckered into buying one.
 
[citation][nom]spanky deluxe[/nom]chaohsiangchen, I said "not much less than about $1500", I'd say $1485 is not much less than $1500. [/citation]

The $3300, 2-Nehalem Mac Pro gives you only Nvidia GT120 and 640GB hard drive, and they charge you additional $200 for 4870 and $100 for 1TB "upgrade." See? I have ATI 4850 and 1TB hard drive in $1485 package. I can go up to $100 lower than $1485 with low end graphics card like and 640GB hard drive. I maximized what I can use with $1500.

Not to mention that the OS is free: Linux is a wonderful thing.
 
[citation][nom]rooseveltdon[/nom]I agree with you norbs,apple is targeting a particular niche and their pricing shows that however my problem is not the comany but the users and their attitude, i have heard all kinds of nonsense from apple fan boys and after a while it simply got to irritating,once i saw a mac head trying to argue that his macbook pro would be better than a sager notebook with the gtx 260m (note that all macbookpros come with the 9600m gt) simply because it cost more, even though the sager came with a better cpu,better ram and faster drive....we argue based on facts mac fan boys and fan girls argue based on rhetoric. If you wanna spend more to look cool fine but don't come to those who know better and tell them you have a better product simply because you got suckered into buying one.[/citation]

Well it's obvious these people don't know what they are talking about, I just ignore these people and whisper to my friend "yeah he's an idiot..." while I smile at the idiot. This just isn't something people should be so passionate about.
 
[citation][nom]megamanx00[/nom]I'll take my cheap removable HP batteries thank you. I don't want to tear apart the laptop just to replace a battery that's also gonna cost way too much.[/citation]

You void your expensive Apple warranty trying to tear apart the laptop just to replace a battery. You must send it to underpaid Apple Inc. employees with a premium charge to your bank account.
 
[citation][nom]chaohsiangchen[/nom]Not to mention that the OS is free: Linux is a wonderful thing.[/citation]
NO OS is 100% free, linux costs hundreds to thousands of dollars to develop to the point that it is usable. Yes it maybe free to download but they NEED donations to keep the company stable.
 
rsud : Damn you make mac users look shallow and stupid with your you can't afford it attitude... I like mac but I would not bash someone who doesn't buy it.. Yeah it is expensive but it is a nice laptop... Windows 7 kicks ass by the way.. Anyways you are stupid for your post....
 
Apple may be taking a loss on the $700 discount. It's not unheard of. Just ask Sony. I seriously doubt it, but it could be a marketing ploy.
 
The whole card reader thing is ridiculous. FireWire>USB, and BetaMax>VHS. Beta is dead, and FireWire is dying. SD is almost standard equipment on everything now. Hello?!?!? Steve?!?!? Hello?!?!
 
[citation][nom]mitzz[/nom]NO OS is 100% free, linux costs hundreds to thousands of dollars to develop to the point that it is usable. Yes it maybe free to download but they NEED donations to keep the company stable.[/citation]

Wrong. A lot of linux codes are written by people by college and grad students as a form of school project. Some professors and research fellow also had their hands in it. Some companies, such as NVidia, although not so "open" minded, also contributed a lot to usability of Linux. Then there came companies like Redhat, IBM and Google, who invested a lot on Linux development so that they can profit from enterprise level. In some cases, such as massive parallel computing, you have no other choice but linux.

In the end, I don't care who pays for it as long as I have free download. I'd like to donate if I had the money, but I certainly don't feel like to contribute anything to Apple Inc. They are filthy rich enough.
 
[citation][nom]chaohsiangchen[/nom]The $3300, 2-Nehalem Mac Pro gives you only Nvidia GT120 and 640GB hard drive, and they charge you additional $200 for 4870 and $100 for 1TB "upgrade." See? I have ATI 4850 and 1TB hard drive in $1485 package. I can go up to $100 lower than $1485 with low end graphics card like and 640GB hard drive. I maximized what I can use with $1500.Not to mention that the OS is free: Linux is a wonderful thing.[/citation]

True. Although the GT120 is perfectly fine for what 90% of Mac Users will need. Remember this is a workstation, not a gaming machine. Agreed, the upgrade price to a 4870 is silly and so is the hard drive upgrade cost. This isn't Apple specific though. Dell's T7500 workstation comes to $3196 for basically the same config but with 4GB of RAM vs 6GB, a 500GB hard drive instead of 640GB and a Quadro NVS 295 instead of the GT120 (similar value). Dell charges $255 to upgrade to a 1TB drive and $410 to upgrade to a Quadro NVS 420.

When buying from any of these manufacturers you should always upgrade as much as possible yourself, e.g. RAM, hard drive, graphics card. Granted, Apple are charging an extortionate amount for their 4870 512MB card (PC cards are unsupported) but with a little bit of know how you can flash standard PC cards. I've got two 4870 1GB cards in my Mac Pro for the cost of a single 4870 512MB Mac Edition! I also only bought the stock hard drive in my Mac Pro originally (three years ago). Its now got over 3TB of storage. :-S

Linux is a great thing indeed but really not suited to most individuals. I love the fact that OS X is Unix based though, lets me use all the open source goodness and means I can do all my programming in ease in a similar environment to my Linux machine at work. Linux is free true, Windows is insanely expensive but OS X Snow Leopard's not half bad when the fully fledged OS X Snow Leopard is only going to be $29 for people who already have Leopard. $169 if not but still, compared to Windows with all the bells and whistles, its not half bad. Add to that the fact that Apple do Family pack licenses and you're laughing. Come September, I'll be able to upgrade all five machines in my house with Snow Leopard for $49 all in. Now how much would five Windows 7 licenses be....
 
All I have to say is that Apple is STILL over-priced. With the processors and RAM touted in this article, you can STILL buy a PC for a lot less.

Like most others here, I find it amusing though that Apple can 'upgrade' their laptops, and THEN wack $300 to $700 off the prices. Seems kinda obvious they have a rather large markup percentage. Because, even in this economy, I'm doubting their production costs have dropped by that much.
 
I don't think you guys realize how shitty windows is, or how amazing mac os x is.

I eat rice for dinner every night, but I still bought a mac, 'cause i wanted soemthing that works great... simple.
 
[citation][nom]spanky deluxe[/nom]True. Although the GT120 is perfectly fine for what 90% of Mac Users will need. Remember this is a workstation, not a gaming machine. Agreed, the upgrade price to a 4870 is silly and so is the hard drive upgrade cost. This isn't Apple specific though. Dell's T7500 workstation comes to $3196 for basically the same config but with 4GB of RAM vs 6GB, a 500GB hard drive instead of 640GB and a Quadro NVS 295 instead of the GT120 (similar value). Dell charges $255 to upgrade to a 1TB drive and $410 to upgrade to a Quadro NVS 420.When buying from any of these manufacturers you should always upgrade as much as possible yourself, e.g. RAM, hard drive, graphics card. Granted, Apple are charging an extortionate amount for their 4870 512MB card (PC cards are unsupported) but with a little bit of know how you can flash standard PC cards. I've got two 4870 1GB cards in my Mac Pro for the cost of a single 4870 512MB Mac Edition! I also only bought the stock hard drive in my Mac Pro originally (three years ago). Its now got over 3TB of storage. :-SLinux is a great thing indeed but really not suited to most individuals. I love the fact that OS X is Unix based though, lets me use all the open source goodness and means I can do all my programming in ease in a similar environment to my Linux machine at work. Linux is free true, Windows is insanely expensive but OS X Snow Leopard's not half bad when the fully fledged OS X Snow Leopard is only going to be $29 for people who already have Leopard. $169 if not but still, compared to Windows with all the bells and whistles, its not half bad. Add to that the fact that Apple do Family pack licenses and you're laughing. Come September, I'll be able to upgrade all five machines in my house with Snow Leopard for $49 all in. Now how much would five Windows 7 licenses be....[/citation]

Nothing you said make any sense. You already paid $3000 (or somebody paid it for you) for a machine that I can get equivalent for more than half the price. Most Mac Pro users have their employers paid for their work. There is utterly no point to have a Dual Xeon for home and personal use. A cheap AMD quad can get the job done for 1/6 of the price acting as a home server. A Q9400 is none slouch either. I'd rather save that money for my trip to Dan Hoff's BunnyRanch than enrich Steve Jobs even more. Paying that much and still praise the product on a PC enthusiast forum is like paying to suck somebody's dick.

Same thing with Dell business computers. Your price listing on Dell is not true. The listing of enterprise/business items on their website are MSRP. Only suckers buy at that price. If you want to buy those items from Dell, pick up a phone and talk to Dell sales. You might be surprised at how much you can save from that perspective.

In the end, Windows 7 is NOT for server. M$ made it very clear that current version of Vista and XP won't support more than two physical CPUs. M$'s server OS is Windows Server 2008, and you can't afford it. Linux is great for average users. I actually had less problem with Ubuntu than Windows 95.

BTW, you just voided warranty of your video cards by flashing them with Mac BIOS.
 
This is my first post here, and I'm only posting because it seems that people won't think anymore before posting. I'm not a Mac fanboy or PC fanboy either. I have both. My desktop computer is a PC and will be a PC for a long long time, till Apple gives me the possibility of choosing the pieces I want in my system (I think NEVER gonna happen 🙂 unless at some point MacOS becomes free to install on every PC). I love to build my own system with my own hands and buying the components I want. I also like the fact of installing and trying different OS (I currently run Win Vista, Win 7 and Linux, and yes I like all of them!). I know I could install all OS on a Mac, but still I can't build it my self, so Mac fanboys this is not an argue, and price is another thing I don't like about desktop Macs. The only almost "reasonably" priced is the "big" MacPro with 2 quad-core Xeons, the "little" one is way overpriced and the iMacs are not an option since you can't change or add any components and they are quite pricy for what you get. Last but not least, if I pay all that money for a computer, I want to be able to at least choose a decent video card for gaming too! Apple just won't give me that choice, with all their overpriced and crappy cards.

When it comes to my notebook, well this time I did get a Mac and I'm really happy with it. I got a MacBook unibody 2.4GHz with 4GB of RAM (from the edu apple store). The OS is really nice (not saying better nor worse than anything else. Every OS has it's pros and cons) and pleasant to use. It was something I wanted to try and for MY NEEDS (I wanted to make cleat that that is just a personal opinion), the MacBook seemed to be the better choice. PC fanboys, please don't bother arguing about the power for price "thing". I know that I could get a PC with a bit more power than the MacBook, but I didn't care. Power wasn't what I was looking for (I have my desktop PC for that 😀 ). I wanted a computer with MacOSX (not a Hackintosh), good quality, good battery life, easy to use and transport, and yes it looks nice too (although I don't care that much about that). Maybe I paid a little bit more, but I really got exactly what I wanted. Who knows in a couple of years, maybe I'll switch back to a Win laptop (always had laptops with windows till now and was always satisfied), but for now Mac is what fits my needs best.

So my conclusion is that there are no "better" or "worse" computers, "Macs" or "PC" (or Windows or Linux if you like it better), but there are computers that fit different needs, and one should first think, evaluate and then buy what is best for him/her.

OT The new iPhone is not bad, but I still would even think about changing my WinMo device! 😛
 
[citation][nom]funkjunky[/nom]I don't think you guys realize how shitty windows is, or how amazing mac os x is.I eat rice for dinner every night, but I still bought a mac, 'cause i wanted soemthing that works great... simple.[/citation]

lol this is such a stupid statement where could i start? i have used osx regularly since tiger and i use windows and linux mint at home,yeah osx looks pretty and doesn't get viruses easily and so? it's not worth an extra 1000 dollars, i haven't had viruses on my windows machine in years, i use mcafee and avast on the laptop and i am good to go, i simply don't go around clicking random sites and downloading stuff i don't knw. My desktop provides for all my needs and actually performs better than a mac pro at the starting price, i got a 4870 and two drives (a velociraptor and a vd caviar black) i paid less than 1200 dollars for it yet i get better performance and i have both linux mint and windows so i can pretty much forget about viruses...the truth is, you bought it because you followed the marketing wave, yeah macs are nice machines but many of us on this site unlike you are very much aware that there are much nicer machines out there for much better prices osx is ok but windows despite all of its flaws ca still do more than osx and linux despite all of its benefits is still free...don't think you know better when you don't your ignorance wll show.
 
seven hours of battery life doing what? That exceed the advertised life rating on many notebooks. As weak as the Atom is, you can't argue that the net power consumption is far less than any core 2 duo, even if Apple had the capacity to undervolt and underclock on a need by need basis.
 
[citation][nom]chaohsiangchen[/nom]Nothing you said make any sense. You already paid $3000 (or somebody paid it for you) for a machine that I can get equivalent for more than half the price. Most Mac Pro users have their employers paid for their work. There is utterly no point to have a Dual Xeon for home and personal use. A cheap AMD quad can get the job done for 1/6 of the price acting as a home server. A Q9400 is none slouch either. I'd rather save that money for my trip to Dan Hoff's BunnyRanch than enrich Steve Jobs even more. Paying that much and still praise the product on a PC enthusiast forum is like paying to suck somebody's dick. Same thing with Dell business computers. Your price listing on Dell is not true. The listing of enterprise/business items on their website are MSRP. Only suckers buy at that price. If you want to buy those items from Dell, pick up a phone and talk to Dell sales. You might be surprised at how much you can save from that perspective.In the end, Windows 7 is NOT for server. M$ made it very clear that current version of Vista and XP won't support more than two physical CPUs. M$'s server OS is Windows Server 2008, and you can't afford it. Linux is great for average users. I actually had less problem with Ubuntu than Windows 95. BTW, you just voided warranty of your video cards by flashing them with Mac BIOS.[/citation]

Only suckers buy Mac Workstations at those prices. Businesses and Educational users get a discount too. I buy all my Apple machines with a 15% discount and three year's warranty for free. I didn't mention anything about servers, only workstations. Workstations have been classified as up to two physical processor chips since the days of XP Professional. XP Pro, Vista Home Premium supports dual physical processor chips etc etc. Vista Home Premium and the equivalent from Windows 7 support dual quad core processor workstations.

When I bought my machine (2006 Dual Dual Core 2.66GHz Mac Pro), Quad core on single chips didn't exist. You couldn't build a machine of equivalent performance unless you used workstation dual dual core chips. The 2006 Mac Pro and 2008 Mac Pro were both a fair bit cheaper than both home built setups and Dell's equivalent model. Dell was $500 pricier compared to the 2006 Mac Pro. Don't believe me? Look here: http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2816&p=1 Shocking proof that some Apple machines were good value. The 2009 Mac Pro is a different story. If you spend some time looking into the CPU prices at launch of each of the Mac Pros, it doesn't take long to work out that Apple's increased its profit margin by about $1000. Had they put the 2.66GHz Dual Quad chips in the machine for the price of the 2.23GHz machine then they would have made approximately the same profit as they did in the past. Right now you can build an equivalent machine for far cheaper than both Apple and Dell and any other manufacturer - i.e. $1000-$1500 cheaper.

You say there's no point in having a dual xeon for home and personal use. I do most of my work on my home machine, I use all my cores and could really do with four more cores. When I'm kicking back and playing the odd game then I probably don't use more than two of them but its a work machine first and foremost. Sure you can now get a Core 2 Quad 2.66GHz for about $350 or about £200 but I've had a similar speed setup for nearly three years now. I paid £1560 for my Mac Pro 2.5 years ago. Used prices for such a machine are now about £950. That works out at about £200 per year for ownership. Probably about £400 per year if you factor in the graphics upgrades and extra RAM I've put in over the years although I'll recoup a lot of that when I sell the upgrades separately.

Yes I realise I voided the warranty on my graphics cards but that's not really a big deal. I wanted two 4870s for Crossfire in Windows for when I want to play the odd game. I'm also interested in seeing if I can rewrite my code to utilise them with OpenCL when Snow Leopard comes out.
 
[citation][nom]ph3412b07[/nom]seven hours of battery life doing what? That exceed the advertised life rating on many notebooks. As weak as the Atom is, you can't argue that the net power consumption is far less than any core 2 duo, even if Apple had the capacity to undervolt and underclock on a need by need basis.[/citation]

Seven hours of battery life for "wireless productivity". It basically means using a computer for general light usage, i.e. internet, word processor type stuff, while connected to a wireless network. That's with display brightness at 50%. Honestly, I've never understood how Apple gets its batteries to last so long. Its not an overexaggeration, my MacBook Pro lasts up to 5 hours under a similar setup. What's even more interesting is that OS lasts up to twice as long on a single charge than in Vista. http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3435&p=13
 
I love competition.
It benefits the end user in the end.

$700 is a decent benefit.

I do like Macs for their engineering I must say.
Lighter, thinner, better battery life etc. than a competing non-mac laptop.
However I dislike them because I do not care for the OS, I dislike the actual look of Macintosh products, and the lack of customization.

They have their uses, and I would enjoy having a notebook/desktop with that level of engineering, but still contains the ability for customization.
The non-removable battery for example is something I would like because they then can focus on making a bettery battery that lasts longer.
 
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