Just wanted to throw a note out there about the new Mac Pro that was just released this morning.  What a dream machine this could be!

[url]http://www.apple.com/macpro/[/url]

Those are some crazy specs!

whoa...that's awesome!  Maybe we could all chip in a get one to share...I got dibs on the first month!  HAHA.

You can build one now for about half the price...  like I did.

They're called ";PCs";.

This thing is awesome!!! but i have to agree with drumcat... i have always been a PC person... but i like some of the productivity things that a mac can do... speaking of which, i was at the apple store the other day and played with logic studio pro... anyone know of anything comparable to that for PC?

[quote author=palosjr link=topic=2223.msg11557#msg11557 date=1199847056]
This thing is awesome!!! but i have to agree with drumcat... i have always been a PC person... but i like some of the productivity things that a mac can do... speaking of which, i was at the apple store the other day and played with logic studio pro... anyone know of anything comparable to that for PC?
[/quote]

The only thing that compares is Cubase, in as far as being a true sequencer with notation... 

I like shiny macs too.  If I could run OSX legally, I would, believe me.  But Apple is too infatuated with selling hardware.  If OSX was available for non-Apple hardware, even at a premium, I'd buy it.  Today.  I would dual boot until I got all my software to be mac software.  But good ol' apple gives me no choice.

That MacPro is a $3000 computer with a $1500 dongle in it.

[quote author=palosjr link=topic=2223.msg11557#msg11557 date=1199847056]
This thing is awesome!!! but i have to agree with drumcat... i have always been a PC person... but i like some of the productivity things that a mac can do... speaking of which, i was at the apple store the other day and played with logic studio pro... anyone know of anything comparable to that for PC?
[/quote]

I have Cubase 4.1 showing up this week...  I'm going to give it a shot at a major notation project.  I'll be posting on here my results.  I'm very comfortable with sequencers, so if the notation is worthwhile, it's going to be my main tool.  Just like some of the Apple guys are doing with Logic.

The good thing about Cubase though is it's cross-platform.

yea I have and use Cubase SX3 and its pretty sweet... i was just wondering if there was anything else out there worth looking into...

Not that has a notation component...  if you don't care about that, Sonar, Reaper... 

It seems to me like the machine didn't change dramtically, the main difference is that the default specs are now a little more beefed up. If you don't need 8-cores, you can drop the price by 500 bucks by going with the 2.8ghz quad-core processor. I have 2 duel core 2.66 ghz processors and I almost never use more than 25% of any core running sibelus/vdl etc. When running 3d games, I";ll use around 25-50% of each core. I've heard that Logic will assign various effects to specific cores now, but I can' speak for the performance gain since I only have one machine to work with :)

The biggest and most exciting part of this new release is the availabliltiy of the Nvidia 8800gt 512mb video card. This is now taking the place of the Radeon x1900. This is good news for anyone doing 3D work/gaming because the x1900 series has a long history of malfunctioning,overheating, and displaying weird triangle and artifacts on screen. In fact, I got my Mac Pro 4 weeks ago and my x1900 is already malfunctioning. I wonder if Applecare will hook me up with the new nvidia card :)

You would hope.  BTW, what's VLD, Charlie?  :)

Apple is a better ";bargain"; at the high end when you have 8-cores because those high-end Xeons are pricey even if you build one yourself.  But if you want quad core, you can build a very fast PC for under $1k that's faster than the $2300 Mac Pro. 

You can also get 1 TB drives for $270 vs. $400 from Apple, or a 500 GB for $100 vs. $250 from Apple.  You can also add 2 GB of DDR2 ECC RAM for $99, vs. $500 from Apple.  (newegg.com has a Mac section)

I also prefer OS X over Windows, but it's not worth over $1,000 to me when I'd be using the same programs anyways. 

[quote author=drumcat link=topic=2223.msg11567#msg11567 date=1199893775]
You would hope.�� BTW, what's VLD, Charlie?�� :)
[/quote]

VLD is a revolutionary new program called ";Virtual Line of Drums"; It was programmed by Cim Jasella a few years back :)

[quote author=perpetualpoet link=topic=2223.msg11575#msg11575 date=1199928844]
[quote author=drumcat link=topic=2223.msg11567#msg11567 date=1199893775]
You would hope.�� BTW, what's VLD, Charlie?�� :)
[/quote]

VLD is a revolutionary new program called ";Virtual Line of Drums"; It was programmed by Cim Jasella a few years back :)
[/quote]

Nice Recovery!!! 8)

I was looking at the workstations offered by Dell and HP and you definitely save a lot if you buy the Mac Pro.  A 3 GHz 8-core stock Mac Pro is $3,600, while a similarly configured Dell Precision is about $4,700.  For a Windows person who doesn't want to build a system, they could install XP on the Mac and save a grand :)

This is an interesting point. Having not delved into the world of building my own workstations, it's interesting to hear that type of comparison. There will always be valid arguments on both sides of the mac/pc debate, and it's probably no mystery that I'm something of a mac fanboy. From my (biased) perspective, even though Macs can seem to be more expensive, it's generally taken me more steps and/or extra purchases (souped up soundcard, video card, peripheral ports, etc) to get a windows box to an equal point of Mac performance. This is (of course) coming from someone who's not interested in hardware tinkering. In the hands of someone who knows the ins-and-outs of building their windows box, the bargain of piecing a machine together for a lower price makes sense. To me however, the time lost in troubleshooting Windows' more common flakiness is worth a lot to me. Definitely worth a few extra bucks up front to know my system is generally configured for some pretty heavy lifting right out of the box.

My huge complaint about Apple is the lack of ";pro"; options when configuring a system.  There's only [i]one[/i] workstation level graphics card, and it's $2850.  On the PC side you have a wide price range of options from not only ATI and nVidia, but Matrox and 3Dlabs.  For video/animation people, a single hard drive is not fast enough to play back uncompressed video without dropping frames.  Apple [i]finally[/i] started offering a 15k rpm drive this week, but again it's the top end at $600.  There are great 10k drives for under $200 on the market.  There is still no RAID configuration option when purchasing either.  Even a $400 Dell has that.  And for us musicians, there are no soundcard options.  Now that Apple uses Intel, I would imagine it's the same integrated sound found in PeeCees.  I'd like to see some M-Audio options or something.

So for me, a Mac Pro out of the box would still require me to buy add-ons at a 3rd party site and reformat/reinstall everything. 

I just wish Steve Jobs would make OS X available to everyone.  Things like the iPrograms are awesome and have no equal on windows.