I just found out that I've been allocated some funds to replace my desktop machine at work. ($2000, to be spent pretty much any way I want, including supplementing it with money from my own budget.) Right now, I've got a recent Core 2 Duo Mac mini, which would be nice to upgrade, but there isn't any particular urgency.

My ideal work machine would probably be the current iMac but with a 30" screen. I rarely slam the CPU, but more screen real-estate would be a feature. The monitor I'm using now (an ancient 23" Apple Cinema HD) is still working, for the most part, but it occasionally glitches. It's ready to be replaced.

Certainly, if I wanted to get a 24" iMac, my work budget pretty much covers it. I can get up to 4GB of RAM and a 2.8 or 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo, which is plenty for my immediate needs, modulo the annoyance that I can't just swap out the computer and keep the monitor. But, if I really want a 30" display, I've got to either get a Mac Pro tower or a MacBook. (*sigh*)

With discount, I can get a stripped Mac Pro tower (2GB of RAM, minimum disk, 2.8 GHz Core Xeon (quad), etc.) for $2149. For contrast, Dell will sell me a loaded "Studio XPS" (Core i7 (2.9GHz, also quad), 12GB of RAM, 750GB disk, and a beefier graphics card) for essentially the same price ($2139). If I strip the Dell down to be more comparable to the stripped Mac Pro tower, it costs $1119 -- half the price, faster CPU, and still with more memory and disk! I'd always thought that, with the Intel transition, Apple's prices were no longer insane. That's clearly not true here and it's quite frustrating.

Buying from what's available today, from Apple, is unattractive. Thus, option #1 is to wait for His Steveness (or His minions) to announce some new hardware. Option #2 is to go the Hackintosh route. Of course, the Hackintosh people like to proclaim that a Hackintosh is not a way to get a cheaper Mac. It's a hobby that will consume your time and so forth.

Ultimately, the question is whether it's worth the investment of my time to deal with running non-Apple hardware. At potentially every software upgrade point, you've got the risk that OS X will fail to run and you'll have to deal with it. And, unless you've got a popular Hackintosh platform, like say the MSI netbook, you don't necessarily have anybody else out there with the same exact configuration as you.

Grumble.

Any thoughts on how I should proceed?

A hackintosh doesn't Just Work, which probably half the benefit of running OSX. Assuming you'll have the desktop for three years, and reading 200 post long hackintosh forum threads isn't your idea of a fun, suck it up and buy the mac pro. You only have to spend the money once, you've got to live with the machine for quite a while.

A netbook hackintosh is just about perfect - it's by definition not your primary machine, so when it's down because you installed 10.5.7 by accident, it's not a big problem. (or, perhaps I'm just trying to justify buying myself a netbook)

I have no expertise whatever when it comes to Apple hardware and software, other than an entrenched attitude "It's different from what I'm used to, so it can't be any good."

That said, my experience in parallel situations (not necessarily computer related) is that you will never regret going the more expensive route if that gets you what you really want. A year from now you won't miss that extra $1,000 (or whatever) and you won't be filled with "shoulda coulda" self recriminations.

tanstaafl.

It seems that you're happy with the Mini except the low display resolution available.

How about a USB-to-DVI adapter like the Tritton SCE2Extreme or any of the variety of DisplayLink products? Or Matrox's Dual- or TripleHead2Go products?

If my goal is to have a 30" monitor, I need something that can drive it. The USB-DVI adapters seem to top out at 1920x1200 or thereabouts, and I'm suspicious of whether or not the extra USB traffic would impact system usability. Also, pragmatically, there isn't really room on my desk for dual 24" monitors. Going to a single 30" monitor, however, looks like it could fit.

The Mac Pro is a workstation class machine, thus comes with error correcting memory ($$), dual CPU socket motherboard ($$), and Xeon class processors ($$). So, it's not surprising that a Dell desktop machine beats it in price. If you priced it against the Precision workstations Dell sells, the prices would more evenly match up.

Also, the Corei7 based Xeons aren't out yet, so the Mac Pro, and similar boxes from other vendors are a bit aged at this point.


Don't. It's possible it won't be stable. It's possible some software may not work depending on how deep the hacks have gone. You won't have proper support. And updates may break your machine. For a hobby, maybe. But for any machine even resembling production for work, or serious home, it's not worth it.

New iMacs, and Mac minis are due out any time now. 10.5.6 already has drivers for them. And odds are, they will all be able to drive a 30 inch LCD.



Ignore the Tritton product if you plan on attaching it to a Mac. It had a really poor still in beta driver that ate CPU time like crazy, and the redraw rate on the second display was poor. I returned mine, and got the eVGA device with DVI, and downloaded drivers from the DisplayLink site. It's not as good as a direct video card, but usable as a second screen for my work Mac Mini.

24in Imac plus existing 23in monitor equals more pixels altogether than a 30in monitor... depends how bad the much wider, shorter form factor would be for the use you make of it.


I think what happened there, is that Apple priced the Mac Pros when the Core 2 Quad Xeons came out, and hasn't reduced the prices since. Those chips are now a whole generation out of date, the chip price has gone way down, and Dell has followed it but Apple haven't.

Having said all that, my trusty old first-generation Mac Pro with its 30in monitor remains the nicest PC I've ever owned, and I've not regretted the expenditure for a minute.

Peter

If you compare the Mac Pro to the not-quite-comparable Dell Precision T7400 line, the prices are far more in line with one another. A stripped T7400 and a stripped Mac Pro come out about the same. The trick is that I don't particularly need "server-grade" parts for my desktop computer, so it would be nice to save that money and spend it elsewhere.



That supports my option of just sitting on my hands and waiting. If there was a future Mac mini with specs comparable to Apple's current MacBook machines and a 30" DisplayPort monitor, like the current 30" but brighter (and hopefully with a non-glossy option), that would be perfect.

The Xeons are pretty stable in their pricing. My Mac Pro has two Xeon E5462 chips in it. When I bought my Mac, I debated between dropping the price by $500 to only have a quad core. Back then, the price of one of the processors retail was ~$850. Checking today, 9 months later, they are still ~$850.

Apple does traditionally do what you say though, in that they don't reduce the price over the lifetime of the product. They just simply replace it at some point. The iMacs, Mac Mini, and Mac Pros are all due for an update sometime soon. The Mac Pro is held up at this point by Intel, assuming Apple keeps the Mac Pro as a workstation using Xeon processors.

If Apple stays true to cyclical form, they will announce multiple new machines within the next 2 to 3 months.

All their desktops are due for a refresh as are their displays. I'd expect them all to be refreshed by WWDC time.

Apart from refreshes, there are also the rumors of new form factors. I won't hold my breath for anything on that front, but you never really know what Apple has down the pipe (even when you're "IN the know" you rarely know )

Any reason not to get a MacBook and just treat it as a desktop system?

Good question. Mostly that a "Mac mini" form factor allows for a larger hard drive, and that hooking a 30" monitor up to the new Macs either requires a crazy DisplayPort <-> Dual-DVI adapter, or maybe you can get the new Dell 30" that has (non-mini) DisplayPort and good luck finding the magic cable.

Also, the laptops cost extra money, since you're buying another display, and a battery, and so forth, that you don't really need. (And, I really don't. I have a MacBook Air that serves my laptop needs quite well.)

Well, it's either buy the display, and a battery, and so forth, that you don't really need or buy the super-duper CPUs and memory you don't really need. Or wait and hope the new Mini comes out in the near future and can support 2560x1600.

The hypothetical "new Mini" is exactly what I want. I just hope that His Steveness allows this thing to not suck in some essential way (e.g., no Firewire).

IIRC, Macs are headed towards FW800 only. Backwards compatible, but you'll have to get a new cable.

FW800 would be fine. USB2.0-only would be non-fine.

The chance of any firewire at all on the new Mac mini is 50/50, if you ask me. I hope it's there, but I won't hold my breath.

Probably depends whether the new Mini is derived from the MacBook or the MacBook Pro. If the latter, then I'd expect Firewire. You never know, though. His Steveness may decide to grace us with an eSATA port instead. (Personally, I'd rather have Firewire because it works with my existing external drives and would make the upgrade process much easier.)

It'd be nice if it had an ExpressCard slot.

Hmm, get rid of the firewire port and a myriad of DV cameras and decks suddenly become useless.

I don't think that's a huge concern to Apple when it comes to a machine like the mini. They axed it on their most popular system, the MacBook after all.

I'd love to see a display-less machine between the mini and the full towers

I just don't know how they'd position it within their existing lineup, especially in terms of price. One way would be to offer something more than the equivalent of an iMac without a display. Maybe quad-core and in three configurations. Up to 8GB of memory should be good.

Dual-display graphics built-in (card in slot), two PCIe slots, one of them being a 16x slot holding the graphics card, two hard drive bays, 2 USB up front, 2 USB in back, FW800 and FW400 up front and again in back, digital and analog audio in back with headphone and speaker up front. GigE in back along with an ExpressCard slot in back as well (for WiFi, etc..)

All in a case about 1/4 the size of a Mac Pro. I think that's a pretty modest description.

I didn't realize that. And it doesn't have an ExpressCard (or CardBus) slot either. Weak.

Sounds like you're asking for Apple to reinvent the Mac Cube, with guts comparable to a modern Shuttle PC. Price-wise, such a gizmo would cost a fraction of what a MacPro Tower costs by eliminating dual processor sockets, using cheaper (non-Xeon) processors, and by using non-ECC memory.

If Apple shipped that, I'd buy two of them tomorrow.

The Macbook (and iBooks before it) have never had an ExpressCard or CardBus slot. It's only been a feature in the pro laptops.

As for Firewire, yeah, it will impact some people. Overall though, firewire is on it's way out, with most newer consumer camcorders using USB instead. For me, the biggest disappointment with both the Air and Unibody Macbook is the inability to put them into target disk mode, a feature present in nearly every Apple laptop even during the SCSI days.

Apple did keep the firewire port though on the recently revised white Macbook.

I'm imagining something a little bigger than a shuttle or a cube, but yes, the general idea is definitely smallish. It should be as easy to get into as a Mac Pro, not as nightmarish as a Cube or Shuttle.

Even if they added a third PCIe slot and made it about half the size of the Mac Pro, the idea is that some people would like this type of smaller desktop that's not using uber-expensive server-class processors and memory.

For now, Firewire disk access (esp. FW800) beats the pants off USB. I'm not going to hold my breath for a Mac with an external eSATA port.

In an iMac revision I'd like to see an Expresscard slot as well. Mainly for using with adapters to insert camera memory cards. We had prototype machines at ATI just before they introduced the (then) new style white iMacs with iSight that had a built-in multi-format card reader. I still don't know why the reader was dropped from production machines.

A card reader would be fantastic. Such a simple and valuable thing.