That's true. But, from what I've read, the 2 GHz Intel chips outperform the 2 GHz PPC chips. So, some improvement has been made.

All I have to say is thats one sexy machine...I will put a kidney on ebay shortly if anyone is interested.

Mike,

Weren't you the one wanting to sell your kidney for the new Canon HDV pro cameras? XH G1 or A1?

heath

Quad-core processors are due out by the end of this year and might show up in laptops in 2007. :-)

Ya, dude, you're startin' to run out of kidneys!

Nope wrong Mike. I'm satisfied with my XL2. Gotta master this thing before even thinking about HDV.

Then guys named Mike are selling kidneys across the web!

hwm

I wonder if this new Mac will/could attract many Windows loyalists.

One can buy this new MacPro and run Mac *and* Windows XP --and have the best of both worlds with no compromises.

According to their price comparisons presentation from Phil Schiller for the similarly configured Dell machine, the Mac Pro is quite a bit cheaper.

It would be funny to see someone buy this and only run Windows.

Until they get a virus, then it's probably going to be a Mac world for that person. Hopefully.

heath

Quad Xeons? Cool. Expensive, but cool. Rumor has it that 'Leopard' might be out before 'Vista'. Now if they finally add 24p support for the HD100.

No, no, no, it's not quad Xeons, it's two dual cores. Yes, there's essentially four processors (cores) going, but it doesn't perform like quad Xeons (ie. four dual cores, thus making 8 cores altogether).

There won't be quad cores until next year, most likely in the Spring which will, conveniently, coincide with Leopard's release. By then I'm sure we'll have the option of dual quad cores, thus making the 8 core dream. Of course, then they'll probably have eight core processors within the next couple of years.

As Jack pointed out, not quad Xeons, just dual... Expensive? That's relative, but go compare with any other dual Xeon workstation available right now from Dell, HP or others. These prices are not bad at all. I'm perfectly happy with my current G5 Quad so I won't be buying one right now, but looks like Apple did a fine job with the new system design and specs.

My only complaint is that they really need some better options for video cards. The FX4500 is fine for those who want to pay the price premium, but why no nVidia 7800 or 7900 options? Their ATI X1900 option is fine, I'd just like to see some more.. What's up with the nVidia 7300? Did they strike a deal with nVidia or one of their OEMs to buy all the crap cards that the PC market refused to buy? ;-)

The new machines look great, but Apple is only claiming a 2x speed bump from the quad G5's, and the speed comparisons the published for the earlier Intel machines were evidently a bit optimistic. Will be interested to see some benchmarks with the pro apps... have been busy for the last few days so I haven't been keeping up with things.

For the time being, my dual 2.5 G5 which I bought in February 2005 is still doing everything I want. I'm just gonna stick with it until I have some compelling reason to upgrade... maybe another year? By then we should really be seeing some incredible machines from Apple.

But we're going to need to get some sort of a decent machine here at work so an artist visiting from Italy can edit video for one of our operas. Heh, maybe that will be a good excuse to get the company to buy me one of those babies ;-)

Yeah Boyd, work it, work it. ;>)

-gb-

I'm a (former? we'll see) windows loyalist... but I may buy one of these things and never let XP touch it. =P

My question is, why are the ram upgrades so expensive? They seem to be about double the price of what I can find for 'standard' price on the same type of ram everywhere else.

Ram upgrades are almost the only thing this box needs to be a solid HD editing computer, and that's where apple seems to padding for extra profit.