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Technology (Apple) Businesses Apple Technology

Xserve Outside the Reality Distortion Field 83

Posted by pudge from the it-is-mac-os-not-macos-dammit dept.
Gentoo69 writes "OSNews has a comparison of the Xserve with other 1U servers. How does the Apple offering stands up against the competition?" (Hint: pretty well.)
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Xserve Outside the Reality Distortion Field More

Xserve Outside the Reality Distortion Field

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  • Read the article for some great detailed information, but don't bother trying to skip to the bottom to see the conclusions. There really aren't any. The Xserve is more expensive than some servers, and less than others. If you want to compare Xserve with Mac OS X Server to an Intel-based box with Windows 2000 Server, Xserve is a lot cheaper. If you compare it to a box with Linux, Xserve is about the same or a little bit more. Strangely, if you compare it to a Sun, Xserve is a lot more expensive. Which seems wrong, somehow....
    • Well, his final conclusions are what they are:
      Apple's first serious foray into the server world definitely have some controversial design decisions. The impact of these will be determined once these units get into the field. From a price standpoint, the Xserve shows up reasonably close to its Intel brethren, and in many cases surpasses the cost effectiveness of the Intel machines. From a performance standpoint, the Xserve should certainly be able to holds its own in many cases, and if Apple's statements are verified, it even will surpass the performance of these Intel based servers on all the major tests. The Xserve can easily be a contender in the low end, low profile server market.
      About your comments about the Suns: look at the specs. They are cheap ... for a sun, but what's always been true about Sun remains true: Don't buy low end Suns!

  • The big questions... (Score:3, Funny)

    by inkfox ( 580440 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2002 @04:47PM (#3568098) Homepage
    ...how long will you tolerate the "add an iPod for $499 more!" hard-sell every time you order another rack unit?

    ...do you really want a 1U rack that advertises color depth and framerate benchmarks instead of requests per second?

    ...do you want to run a server that can be DOS'd by crashing OpenGL?

    And most importantly...

    ...do you trust your lonely sysadmin alone with a "lickable" server?

    • You are probably trolling, so I won't get into it in depth.

      If Apple's ad [apple.com] appears to be advertising graphics over real server stuff, then you are missing something. Intentionally, I'm sure.

      mark
    • I agree that giving color depth and framerate on servers is a bit silly but as Steve Jobs said at the Xserve's introduction, this is Apple's first concerted foray into the enterprise, so the fact that maybe their advertising isn't quite up to snuff isn't surprising. I'm not making excuses for Apple just pointing out where they're coming from. Although given that Apple has said they envision the Xserve being installed in rendering farms maybe catering to graphics people that speak "graphic design" will be wooed by the a 1U rack that advertises color depth and framerate benchmarks.

    • Re:The big questions... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dborod ( 26190 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2002 @06:42PM (#3568856) Homepage
      Regarding the color depth and framerate benchmarks, there are going to be a ton of video professionals usng the Xserve as a workstation in addition to the folks using it as a more traditional server.

      I'm glad that Apple provides the video card options that they do on this bos.
    • The Quartz & Aqua GUI are no more an essential part of the OS than, say, X11 & KDE are. If the GUI freezes up, ssh into the box & restart it. GUI != a bad server OS.

  • Good deal for the enerprise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by inkfox ( 580440 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2002 @04:57PM (#3568168) Homepage
    In all seriousness, this is a good deal for the enterprise.

    The big benefit doesn't come from the hardware. The benefit comes from the fact that it's as easy as or easier to administer than a Windows server, and it comes with an unlimited user license. The bulk of the cost of most Windows-based servers is the licensing.

    • Re:Good deal for the enerprise (Score:4, Insightful)

      by qeL3-i ( 577868 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2002 @06:12PM (#3568681)
      AND! It doesn't come with Windows and all the associated site-licensing and audits and stuff. That's gotta be a big load off an IT manager's mind.
      • yep, any new alternative to the tragedy of a Windows server (and that means CIFS... and Exchange... and Windows Media... etc etc etc) is a good thing. Particularly where that server is aimed at installations WITHOUT a dedicated IT dept. OTOH this review tells us little we didn't already know - we want real world performance comparisons and uptime stats on REAL machines in REAL server environments

    • Re:Good deal for the enerprise (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes, come to think of it, the computers on the Enterprise D do somewhat resemble the elegance and sophistication we've come to expect from Apple.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2002 @05:11PM (#3568253)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Based on the pictures that I've seen and read about the IBM x330 server, the included memory are regular memory modules. There are some x330 models that have something called MXT (Memory eXpansion Technology) that acts like a large L3 cache that buffers and handles seeks and bursts better. I don't know how large the MXT size is, but the MXT memory modules are integrated onto the motherboard rather than a removable module. If it did fail, then it would be a pain in the ass to replace, but I don't think it's the system RAM that is integrated onto the motherboard.

    • Re:won't replace windows (Score:2, Interesting)

      by pmz ( 462998 )
      The problem with comparing OS X with an intel server running windows is that companies buying windows servers are most likely tied to MS for some reason (.NET). I don't see the Xserve competing with a wintel box at all.

      The Apple servers do compete directly with wintel servers. As time passes, there are more and more people looking to sever their dependencies on Microsoft software, and one outlet is the new Apple servers (or Linux/Intel, or Solaris/SPARC, etc.). Basically, anything that is "the way out" of the Microsoft-only business infrastructure is legitimate competition.
    • I recently considered the IBM XSeries 300 and 330, and I was told by their rep that the standard for the 300 is 256, and if you want to upgrade to say 1 Gig, you have to buy 2 512 meg chips, on top of the 256 that's included. I tried everything I could to get them not to include the 256, but they said there was nothing they could do. It's just a regular 256 Meg pc133 ECC sdram stick, so I don't know what the big deal would be, but it was really annoying. I wanted 1024 megs of ram in the machine, and paying for an extra 256 I didn't need just seemed dumb. The rep suggested selling the 256 on ebay. So I went with Gateway (though not for this reason alone, of course).

  • Compaq prices (Score:2, Informative)

    by questionlp ( 58365 )
    I think that the prices for the Compaq servers are way out of line compared to what someone can buy one through a reseller (like CDW or Insight). I'm guessing that the author of the article just went to Compaq's online store and configured the servers to get the outrageous prices. I think almost everyone knows that Compaq screws people with the prices listed on their site. Below are just some of the overpriced items:
    • $3300 for a second P3-S 1.4Ghz processor
    • +$7833 to upgrade from 256MB of RAM to 2GB of RAM (obviously inflated)
    • +$2500 for a 73GB hard drive
    I have ordered a quad P3 Xeon (700Mhz with 1MB cache), 1GB of RAM, 4x 36GB 10K SCSI hard drives, Compaq 4x00 RAID controller for just over $20k and that was over a year ago. The only pieces that we purchased that were not Compaq branded were the memory modules (go Crucial!). Sure... there is a difference between a 7U server and a 1U server, but smart shoppers will not get dry humped by purchasing Compaq servers and options directly from Compaq.

    • Re:Compaq prices (Score:2, Informative)

      by pi radians ( 170660 )
      The same goes for Apple's site. You'll be better off getting the lowest amount of RAM and HDD and then adding them yourself. Companies like Apple and Compaq sign contracts with hardware companies that will always have inflated prices.
    • While I have heard good things about Crucial memory, I'm never, ever going to buy anything from them from now on. Why? They support gun control.

      I wish I could provide more information, but the page where you could find out this information (put up by the gun grabbers themselves) is no longer up at:

      http://www.progressivefunds.com/hci/

      Nevertheless, while it WAS up, Crucial was one of several companies (along with Dell, McAfee, The Sharper Image, OfficeMax, and even Reader's Digest!) who you could signup with to donate part of your puchase to Handgun Control Inc.

      Since I treat the Second Amendment with no less reverance than the first, I will never buy any products from any of these companies ever again.

  • I saw this review a couple of days ago but didn't look to carefully at it since there weren't any benchmarks (from either Apple or reviewers). During the Xserve introduction Steve Jobs said benchmarks would be available in a couple weeks, so now that has been a couple of weeks maybe we'll see something soon.

  • Possible issues (Score:3, Insightful)

    by drsmithy ( 35869 ) <drsmithy&gmail,com> on Wednesday May 22, 2002 @06:07PM (#3568639)
    (I've posted this previously at macslash - some modifications since then.)

    (I'm speaking here as a SysAdmin, primarily of FreeBSD and Sun boxes, who uses OS X on a TiBook for most things. This is why I wouldn't buy an Xserve for general purpose use.)

    No ECC RAM. This is one of the biggest omissions IMHO. As far as I'm concerned, without ECC it's not even in the running.

    Only 2GB of RAM. 2G isn't much, these days, particularly if they want to be moving into the Oracle market. I would have expected 4G minimum.

    No SCSI option. I'm far from a SCSI bigot, but at the end of the day if boatloads of disk I/O and random-access disk patterns are what you have, SCSI is faster. If all the local disks are going to be used for is booting the machine or perhaps some low-end fileserving, then ATA disks are fine - but it would have been nice to see an option on the high-end machine to swap the ATA drives for SCSI drives. I consider this particularly relevant to Apple's apparently upcoming foray into Oracle territory. I do applaude Apple for making an ATA-based machine that isn't bottom-of-the-barrel everywhere else though (unlike Dell with their PE 350).

    No hardware RAID. Again, I consider this a rather large omission as it *seriously* limits the amount of "useful" disk space available. AFAIK OS X doesn't do software RAID5, so you're limited to either a RAID1+0 (with some space subtracted from each drive for the system, since OS X won't be able to boot from a RAID0 - or a RAID5 for that matter, should it be added to Jaguar) or an optimised-for-failure RAID0 (again, losing some space to the system). Even one of those halfway-hardware-RAID chips put on many PC motherboards would have been sufficient, as it at least manages to make all the devices appear as a single drive to the OS, but ideally they would have used one of the existing "real" IDE RAID cards like 3ware make. From where I'm standing, these things top out at around 200 - 220GB of usable space. Other people may be prepared to risk the fourfold increase in risk by using RAID0 over all the drives, but I wouldn't be.

    Apart from those things, I think the Xserve is an ok deal, depending on your needs. The places I expect to see them popping up are:

    * Data-processing clusters, in which case my RAID requirements above are largely moot (the ECC comment is still very relevant though). They'll be a good deal for this, assuming the required processing benefits greatly from Altivec. If not, a bunch of PowerEdge 1650s are a better deal.

    * Low-end fileserving. Eg, to the small group of Mac users we have here, or for a small company. In this case the large amount of storage for the relatively low price is pretty good - although my above comments about the RAID aspect should be taken into account. Additionally, the (undoubtedly simple and excellent) management tools will be a real winner here.

    For general purpose use though (eg file & print serving to a range of different machines) I'll stick with my PowerEdge 1650s running FreeBSD. On that note, I'll just point out a few things about the 1650s (my personal favourite 1U machine) that I see a lot of people making these comparisons neglecting:

    Price. They start cheaper and mostly stay cheaper.

    Processing power. For some things, the 1Ghz G4 is going to be faster. For most things, the 1.4Ghz P3 is going to be faster. For the most things, however, CPU power is largely irrelevant as the tasks are IO bound - in which case the SCSI on the 1650 gives it the edge.

    Dual power supplies. Not essential, but nice to have.

    Up to 4G RAM and ECC. It might be slower PC133, but even that is going to be faster than swapping. Plus it has ECC - essential for any non-toy server IMHO.

    Hardware RAID. Very important - bumps the "usable" amount of disk space up to about 200G (3x73G drives) which puts it in the same ballpark as the Xserve in terms of "usable" storage. Given the 128MB of cache included, also nullifies most of the overhead of RAID5.

    Free slots. Even with hardware RAID and dual GB ethernet, the 1650 still has two 64 bit/66Mhz slots free. I'm not quite sure what Apple are thinking with their combo AGP/PCI slot...

    Support. The standard support with the 1650 is four hour onsite support. To get that level with the Xserve costs an extra US$950. I'm not sure what Apple's "standard" support is (anyone ?), but bringing the 1650 back to "3 years next business day" knocks nearly US$1800 off the price. Apple are rather coy about exactly what support is included with the Xserve by default - I'd like to see a definite answer as to what you get with just the machine.

    I banged together a 1650 that I consider equivalent to Apple's high-end offerings to compare prices:

    1650 w/dual 1.4GHz P3, 2GB RAM, 3x73GB 10kRPM drives, RAID controller, 3yrs SILVER support (4hours onsite) : US$7873

    Xserve w/dual 1Ghz G4s, 2GB RAM, 4x120GB drives, Applecare premium: US$7799

    1650 advantages: much more expandability, much faster drive subsystem, ECC RAM.

    Xserve advantages: faster processors if you use something benefiting from Altivec, potentially easier administration.

    Personally, I think the 1650 is a better machine for most tasks. But Apple has done fairly well with the Xserve as a first go. I look forward to the second generation which will hopefully address my concerns above.

    • All very interesting points.

      About your SCSI concerns, i would like to point out that the Xserve can be configured from the apple store with an UItra160 SCSI card. You'd still need to somehow manage to buy SCSI drives separately and i guess that ain't cheap and it prolly doesn't fit as nicely in the architecture as the ATA controllers.

      And i'm wondering what other types of tweaks you could make to this architecture by playing with configurations on the upper and lower PCI slots, like set-up a hardware RAID? in any case, my guess is that any such tweak wouldn't be cheap, nor as nicely integrated in the 1U architecture.

      any thoughts?

  • Dumbest ever (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2002 @06:17PM (#3568705)
    I think I was bamboozled and run amuck. That was by far one of the stupidest articles I have ever read comparing any technologica ldevice to any other technological device. Even from a platform advocacy standpoint it was pretty fucking stupid. The author looked up prices on the vendors websites and made some dumbfuck guesses about the performance of the systems. BSD is dying trolls can fucking do that. Some points I found especially stupid:

    - Rehashing the SCSI/ATA debate. Unless you're going to do a really in depth benchmark of SCSI and ATA drives it is fucking pointless to bring the subject up. Depending on the operating systems, host controller drivers, file system, main memory, DMA constroller, south bridge quality, time of day, and phase of the moon performance between SCSI and ATA drives varies widely. A 7200RPM ATA drive on a badass ATA controller can have better througput than a badass SCSI drive of the same speed. The ATA host controllers give ATA drives capabilities similar to that of SCSI drives if not superior ones at a lower cost per megabyte. A SCSI drive is just a dumb disk with a smart controller.

    - Not including the price of software. Unless you're going to be sticking a Free as in beer or speech OS onto one of your x86 systems that don't have the OS pre-loaded you need to include that price. For Windows you're either buying a limited client license or an unlimited client license, that would set even the cheapest of those servers up a couple hundred dollars. The Xserve and Netra come with unlimited user license for the OS (AFAIK with the Netra) with the Xserve using Apache and the Netra having a single processor license for the Sun ONE webserver (iPlanet).

    - Saying the G4 is better for multimedia. Fuck, by the multimedia definition used for the G4 you can say the Athlon is geared mainly as a multimedia processor because it has a strong FPU performance. What the fuck is wit hthat backwards logic. Serving up static web pages isn't very processor intensive, often times the overhead for the transaction is beefier than the transaction itself. The efficiency of the web server and if used the dynamic page generation code greatly affects performance. The processor can't be blamed when the OS can't handle the increasing transactions. Case in point were the Netcraft benchmarks showing that that particular kernel version couldn't build and tear down processes fast enough to keep up with IIS' worker thread model. The processor didn't have anything to do with that problem.

  • Power Consumption (Score:2, Insightful)

    by fuzzbrain ( 239898 )
    Doesn't a G4 consume less power than a Pentium/Athlon? The picture here [apple.com] shows that it does have fans, but I would assume that maybe that don't have to work as hard as those on an X86 system? So would the running costs be less for the Xserve?
    • not really at 1Ghz+. I think that all current (non-mobile) chips chew at least 30W at 1Ghz. Heat generating monsters like the AthlonXP 2100+ (1733Mhz) are dissipating double that at least.
  • One important consideration when you're considering a system with 2 GB ethernet ports on it is how much load this puts on the CPU. For Sun's UltraSparcII based servers, they recommended you budget one CPU for each GB Ethernet adapter in the machine. The reason: all the CPU activity in the TCP/IP stack for that volume of traffic was considerable. Keep in mind, while Sun was suggesting it, their kernel IO was quite good (I don't know how OS X stacks up in this category) and their GB Ethernet adapters were among the best in the industry for low CPU load. So, 2 GB adapters on a low end server is fancy and cool, but don't expect to actually be pushing that many bits through. There is a reason Gigabit Ethernet has won the nickname "200MB Ethernet."

    • Well, considering that the PCI bus you're hooking up the GB adaptor to has a 264MBps max throughput (32bit 66MHz on the Mac), factoring in overhead and such, it's not surprising that GigaE runs at 200MBps...

      Now if they had a 64bit 66MHz adaptor (since the XServe has two of those), you could maybe see ~400MBps...

      Then factor the fact that there are 2 CPUs and two GigaE boards means if they share one PCI bus, then the bottleneck is neither the CPU nor the cards... here's to hoping that each board sits on a separate PCI bus :)

      • Well, considering that the PCI bus you're hooking up the GB adaptor to has a 264MBps max throughput (32bit 66MHz on the Mac), factoring in overhead and such, it's not surprising that GigaE runs at 200MBps...
        I think you are confusing bytes/second and bits/second. A 32-bit 66MHz PCI bus has a data rate of 266 Megabytes/second, which is more than twice the data rate of Gigabit Ethernet.
        Then factor the fact that there are 2 CPUs and two GigaE boards means if they share one PCI bus, then the bottleneck is neither the CPU nor the cards... here's to hoping that each board sits on a separate PCI bus :)
        In the Xserve the primary Gigabit Ethernet port is on the logic board and controlled directly by Apple's custom memory controller/north bridge ASIC. It doesn't occupy any expansion slots and doesn't consume any PCI bus bandwidth.

        The other Gigabit Ethernet port is on a PCI card that is installed, in the standard configuration, in the Xserve's combination PCI/AGP 4X half-length slot. This bus should have adequate bandwidth for Gigabit Ethernet as no other slots are connected to this bus.

        The other two full-length slots are on a different bus. They are served by a single 64-bit 66MHz PCI bus with a data rate of 533 Megabytes/second. In the standard configuration one of these slots is filled by a VGA graphics card. The four ATA/100 busses are connected to this PCI bus, so intensive disk I/O could interfere with the performance of cards in these two slots.
  • Hate to say it, but this site reeks of blind Mac devotion. I'm not trolling. I'm a Mac user too, but even so, I really hate Mac advocacy sites and would hope that the moderators here on the Slashdot Apple site are savvy enough to weed these out. I could be wrong about this site, but that's my gut instinct after browsing it a little.

    --Rick

  • Criticisms missing... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BitGeek ( 19506 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2002 @07:03PM (#3568957) Homepage

    Top ten criticisms about the XServe (if I can come up with ten).
    1. It doesn't use SCSI!!!
    Weren't you the guy I was arguing with in 1995 about how superior SCSI was to IDE, yet you were whining about how expensive SCSI was and how Macs always cost more because of it?

    More specifically: Apple announced a FCAL based drive array at the same time. FCAL is MUCH faster than SCSI. Clearly Apple is offering a competitive solution if you need a serious server, and given the prices NetAppliance and EMC charge, I bet they will be extremely price competitive on this front. (As usual)

    2. The G4 os SO SLOW!
    This is true for people who believe that integer performance is all that matters... but even then, if you do a fair comparison, the G4 gets 2-3 times as much done in a clock cycle. But the reality, these days, is that modern operating systems make extensive use of floating point math, and in this the G4 excels. Hell, the entire UI for Apple will be a 3D rendered surface come the next release, and what isn't off-loaded to the graphics card will be well handled by the G4. The place that integer performance matters a lot is in un-optimized poorly written windowing systems, like Windows and Linux. Those crowds have gone down the path of making poor use of the processor and just buying ever increasing MHz. This puts you further and further behind- as the PowerPC benefits from the same advancements in MHz, the Apple solution gets faster at a much faster rate.

    3. I can build a better linux server for half the price!
    Ok, but it won't be in 1U will it? 1U is an expensive case to buy (with built in sliding rails , remember.) 3U cases were $700 last I looked. Will it have four IDE controllers? Dual Gigabit Ethernet? Dual processors? 2G of RAM? Seems slashdotters often like to compare high end apple hardware to an off the compUSA shelf desktop PC and claim Apple's overpriced. (That is if they actually do a comparison, usually its just an unsupported claim.)

    4. Linux is FREE so there's no value in OS X! comaprisons to windows are Silly, NOBODY uses windows!

    Right. Actually, Linux is not free in any real sense. Windows has a high cost when you install it, and then ongoing costs every year. Linux has an equivilent cost when you install it and ongoing costs every year. The difference is with linux you pay the cost in labor. If your labor is worth minimum wage, then Linux is a great deal. If it isn't, the increased cost in installation and ongoing maintenance of the software is pretty high. (Though Windows has lower maintenance labor it does have license costs, so Linux is cheaper ongoing.)

    OS X on the other hand is no cost to install (if you took off the full retail price of OS X Server the Apple hardware would be a LOT cheaper in the comparison of prices!) and has a lot lower labor cost to maintain the server. GUI server maintenance is worth the cost-- if you value your time above minimum wage.

    Don't get me wrong- I don't dislike Linux. I run it on every machine I have that can't run OS X. I just see these servers for the value that they are... and want to bring a happy, productive, less expensive life to you who have forsaken Apple. You deserve to get more done at lower cost too. (Unlike Windows fans, they deserve the torture they get.)
    • 2. The G4 os SO SLOW!

      This is true for people who believe that integer performance is all that matters... but even then, if you do a fair comparison, the G4 gets 2-3 times as much done in a clock cycle. But the reality, these days, is that modern operating systems make extensive use of floating point math, and in this the G4 excels. Hell, the entire UI for Apple will be a 3D rendered surface come the next release, and what isn't off-loaded to the graphics card will be well handled by the G4. The place that integer performance matters a lot is in un-optimized poorly written windowing systems, like Windows and Linux. Those crowds have gone down the path of making poor use of the processor and just buying ever increasing MHz. This puts you further and further behind- as the PowerPC benefits from the same advancements in MHz, the Apple solution gets faster at a much faster rate.

      I think you've been led astray, stranger. Virtually all the code of modern operating systems is integer pipeline code, as it should be. Memory management, file i/o, program loading, etc. are just not meaningful floating point tasks. The one aspect of the operating system that stands to make heavy use of the fp pipelines is the GUI renderer, and OSX is the first operating system to really need to consider this, with, lets face it, a computation intensive GUI. Although most of the OSX rendering workload, alpha-transparency calculations, are strictly integer.

      • Altivect is not only for floating-point, it includes 8/16/32/64bit integers vectors of size 16/8/4/2 respectively. So it can be used to copy data from a specific spot in memory to any other spot fast.
        • Actually, AltiVec doesn't support 64bit integers

          It supports 16 8 bit integers per vector, 8 16 bit, 4 32 bit, or 4 single precision floats per 128bit vector.

          32 vector registers

          4 operand instructions, some pixel formats, a boolean format.

          Fully pipelinable single clock instructions

          But no 64bit integers ;)

  • What XServe has that others don't: (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bsartist ( 550317 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2002 @09:59PM (#3569749) Homepage
    Two words: Avie Tevanian. He's the man behind Mach - the microkernel at the heart of OS/X. Mach has had good clustering and distributed computing support from day zero.

    Think about it. With relatively little effort, Apple could build a 64-cpu rack-mounted Mac. Any app that uses Mach threads - that is, any multi-threaded, native (Cocoa or Carbon) OS/X app - would be able to take advantage of them.
  • How can you trust a guy that can't even read the pricing on the Compaq website? He has posted an addendum to the article to say that the pricing on the Compaqs was for purchasing a 3-pack of the servers. So the pricing on the Compaq machines was 3 times the cost of 1. So now the Compaq machines drop to about $4,000 and $6,000. I wonder what other fact checking he forgot to do?

  • Useless Comparison (Score:3, Insightful)

    by theolein ( 316044 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @01:09PM (#3573616) Journal
    To all those people who think this is an overpriced machine: You're right! Yes, you're right. It is expensive. Will it sell? Yes. Why? Because Apples target markets, Video and audio production companies and schools and colleges who already have large installed bases of macs will buy them.

    If you're one the I_can_build_my_pc_at_3am_while_snoring_loudly crowd you would probably always go for an x86 parts anyway. But do you run a company off it? Who do you go to if the server breaks down? Do you have a guarantee? Do you have easy managment tools? Can you configure Appletalk on the server side?

    I have no doubt that this machine fits in somewhere in the middle of the pack for stats alone and that you can get cheaper and more expensive x86 machines, with SCSI etc etc. But it will still sell. I can't prove it to you, but I vote we take a look in six months when it the RAID option have been out for a few months.

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