Apple’s Game-Changers

brian Posted on November 30th, 2009 1 comment

A few weeks ago, Apple announced some pretty big overhauls to their product line with new iMacs, new Minis, new MacBooks, etc. Maybe I’m just jaded from my time in retail, but new product announcements from Apple rarely excite me anymore. I doubt anything is going to top the pinnacle: witnessing the revelation of the iPhone in person a couple years ago and getting in line to get one on the first day. Something simple as the new mouse? Yawn. (To be fair, now that I have a Magic Mouse, I really, really like it.)

But as the title of this blog post alludes, there were a couple of items that gave me cause to do a double-take.

Of course you knew this one would appeal to me as it is a tacit endorsement by Apple of a server strategy that BestMacs has deployed for years: the Mini as a server.

We often paired the Mini at $599 with a copy of server at $499 (the unlimited version of Leopard was $999). And because the Mini’s hard drive was not fault tolerant, nor easily expandable, we would pair the Mini with some external storage, our current favorite being the Drobo, at around $400, plus drives at maybe $200. Altogether the price tag came to around $1700.

That’s why the Mini Server is a game changer: you save $700 if you are willing to 1) sacrifice an optical drive so you have a redundant internal hard drive for fault tolerance and 2) work with 500GB of storage, sacrificing the better expansion of a Drobo.

Believe it or not, we have already been involved in 3 rollouts of these devices with at least 3 more on the horizon for 2010.

But it’s not just the cost savings, it’s the psychological factor: I don’t think people realized that OS X Server could be installed on any Mac; therefore the only option was an expensive and cumbersome (for anyone without a server rack) Xserve. Along comes this new hardware at a third (or a fifth the way we configure Xserves) the price… and wow! And just look what it can do. (My whitepaper on Snow Leopard Server will be done very soon.)

The second game changer is the Quad-core 27″ iMac. This is the first time I can think off the top of my head where Apple has introduced a nearly pro-level machine in the midrange pricing. We’ve already been recommending 24″ iMacs for graphic designers for a while now, and the 27″ screen on a 3GHz dual-core model would have been just as good. But for just $300 more to get a quad-core is amazing. Consider for a moment that just a couple of years ago, your choice for a graphic designer would have been a Mac Pro starting at $2500 without a display. Now for $1999, you get the same quad-core horsepower, 4GB of RAM standard, and a 27″ display?! That’s awesome.

It’s so awesome in fact that many (including some heretofore well-respected Mac journalists) have speculated that this is the end of the Mac Pro. Macworld’s numbers certainly back up that thought – the quad-core is faster than a stock Mac Pro right now because of the new chipset Apple is using. But I’m not ready to call the Mac Pro dead yet. You have to know that a new Mac Pro sporting an even better version of the chipset is around the corner, and the rumor sites are already talking about it.

The big reason Mac Pro will not get cannibalized by the 27″ Quad iMac is expansion. And for video professionals, it’s all about expansion: adding drives in a RAID array, adding “capture” cards, etc. Even though some bloggers make a good point that the software has to catch up to the Mac Pro hardware, surely Apple is working on a 64-bit version of Final Cut Studio to take advantage of that awesome hardware, and the under-the-hood-optimizations of Snow Leopard, right? In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple announced them at the exact same time.

While rumors of the Mac Pro’s death are greatly exaggerated, the iMac 27 Quad is a game-changer because it firmly plants the midrange iMac as the machine for just about any design professional besides the videographer.

1 responses to “Apple’s Game-Changers”

Daniel Cheeseman February 1st, 2010 at 07:50

Don’t you just love the Imac! It definetly gets my thumbs up for graphic design and web development but I could never get rid of my PC cause of modern warfare 2! lol

Nice blog and keep up the good work

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