A sports-car is something which a lot of people aspire to, but which most people would never buy; spending that kind of money on something which is at least 50% image, and which one would never really use to its full potential (unless one were a racing driver with access to a suitable track) just seems like an extraordinary folly.
But!… says the pleading inner voice, but they’re soooo pretty, and this one goes so fast it boggles the mind! It makes these fabulous sounds, and it imparts such a sense of power…
Fo
r those of us who lust less after fast cars, however, there is a precisely equivalent nemesis: Apple. Always they seem to be the coolest, the fastest, the prettiest, and, unfortunately, the most expensive. Even now… *sigh*.
But the shipping is free …
It’s actually a really good value system price-wise for the gear it comes with (the original MacPro was about $500 cheaper than the equivalent Dell at the time, and of much better build quality). It is, of course (unless you really are doing lots of really intensive computational work), complete overkill. It’s incredibly frustrating that Apple doesn’t have a midrange upgradeable tower of some sort (in a similar price range to the old G4 power macs).
I’d love a dual core Conroe CPU with the option to get a high-end gaming graphics card in a tower where I can upgrade the RAM to up to 4GB, replace the DVD burner with a blue ray drive in the future, and have 2 hard disks so I can mirror them. I don’t need a display (and I wouldn’t buy one from Apple because their displays *are* overpriced). Arggh! I won’t be getting rid of my PC anytime soon, I guess. (and I’ll have to start saving for a macbook).
I don’t think the sports-car analogy necessitates that it be overpriced for the gear it comes with. I would say that, no matter what’s inside it, it’s overpriced for a desktop PC. IMHO, Apples are ‘the most expensive’ because they are ‘the fastest’ and ‘the prettiest’. You get what you pay for, but, like a sports-car, you have to ask: do you really need it? 🙂
Then again, one could always buy a Mac mini, or a volkswagen.
That’s why I said it was complete overkill in my post :-). And to be fair to apple, their target market for the MacPro is not the (home) desktop PC market, it’s people who need grunty workstations for computationally intensive work (scientists, editors, sound engineers – people who want to run things like Maya or Logic).