Apple Store Reopens With Many New Products

An anonymous reader writes "After being down for a couple of hours, the Apple store reopened this morning. All of the speculation has turned out to be a reality with Apple dishing out many new products and among them are; iMac 20", three iMac 24" models, two Mac Mini models, and two Mac Pro models — with one including an ATI Radeon HD 4570 graphics card. Also as rumored, there was the new Airport Extreme, and Time Capsule in 1TB. The Mac Pro is the granddaddy of them all. The lower-end Quad Core system includes a 2.66Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor, 3GB of memory, 640GB hard drive, 18x double-layer Superdrive, and a NVIDIA Geforce GT 120 with 512MB of memory priced at $2,499. Finally, we have the 8-core system which includes two 2.26Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, 6GB of memory, 640GB hard drive, the 18x double-layer Superdrive, and of course the NVIDIA Geforce GT 120 with 512MB of memory priced at $3,299."

Re:ATI Cards in a MAC... never again

[the_B0fh]

And so, you prefer NVidia's clusterfuck that's going on right now, and has been for the past 18 months or so?

More affordable? Prices sky rocketed in many

[Shivetya]

markets.

Man are the fanbois belly aching on many of the bigger sites. What shocked most is that prices for the new machines went up and in some cases a lot. An example comparing old aussie prices to new http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=7199753&postcount=164 [macrumors.com]

What is missing is...

LED screens on the iMacs
Blu-Ray (of course no one really expects it)
Quad Cores

Mac Mini got its update but the price is absurd as well.

For those of us who are still upgrading (I have an older 2.13c2d white model) some selected upgrades push ship times out four to six weeks (like buying an ati 4850 chipset)

Amazing that what Apple considers affordable is getting more extreme. Consumer level goods are professional level pricing.

But do the Minis come with a Remote?

[mwecksell]

I can't find out from Apple's page - do the new Mac Minis come with a bundled remote control? Because I'm thinking of putting one under the TV - especially with the low power draw at idle, the ability to do 1080p without breaking a sweat, and the firewire 800 port that will tell my external hard drives to spin down when not needed. Heck, this could probably handle my Time Machine backups for the other macs in the house while serving 1080p. Now if only Apple would rent HD Movies to this machine. Sadly, they still only rent HD to the Apple TV. ---matt

Re:More affordable? Prices sky rocketed in many

[TheRaven64]

Reread what the grandparent said: In certain markets. The price of the Mac Mini has gone up by a fair amount in the UK. None of the current lineup looks particularly enticing, but I still have 18 months left on my MacBook Pro's warranty, so I don't have to worry about replacing it any time soon. I'm starting to think that my next machine won't be a Mac though.

Re:Weaker video all around next to the old systems

[ifrag]

This is exactly why I have not considered Mac as a viable option for me. The video card offerings are just not current enough. Why is it that everything else in the system is relatively high end and the video cards fall off the face of the planet on the low end or mid-range at best?

Until they either offer a base system with either NO VIDEO CARD (choose your own later) or something in the GTX 200 series, I can see no point in buying one. And what's up with the single HD4870, why not at least offer an X2? High end everything else and then crap for video card makes a nice workstation, but it's an insanely underpowered gaming rig. And at the price range of the Mac Pro, the only reasonable thing to compare it to is gaming class systems.

Re:ATI Cards in a MAC... never again

[drachenfyre]

It was the Radeon X1900XT. I had both the original and the updated versions cards. The machine was basically used for World of Warcraft (Which isn't hard on a GPU by any standard). http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/Graphics/X1900XT_Overheating/ATI_X1900_artifacts.html [xlr8yourmac.com] is a convenient rundown on the issues with the card. And yes, I prefer the current NVidia mess. At least I know what I'm getting. The X1900XT issues were related strictly to the Apple versions of the cards. It was stupid when I had to reseat the card at least 5 times to get the machine to boot (It would fail boot bios checks and hang). Since I put in the 8800 GT, I've had no issues. Not one. As I said, I would never trust any Mac with an ATI product in it after that mess.

Re:But do the Minis come with a Remote?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're mostly interested in a set-top box for HD video, why not save a few hundred and get something specialized for that. [popcornhour.com]

Re:Weaker video all around next to the old systems

[mblase]

High end everything else and then crap for video card makes a nice workstation, but it's an insanely underpowered gaming rig.

Everyone knows that, despite Apple's best efforts, Macs are a year behind PCs when it comes to major games anyway. I doubt anybody who's shopping for a gaming rig even gives Apple a second thought.

Re:Prices are completely nuts

[Idiomatick]

I did some research and its even better. I can get my laptop for 1300 AND a pc matching their specs for the same price as their pc. So its 55% pure profit, awesome.

Re:More affordable? Prices sky rocketed in many

[PIBM]

From apple website, you can buy the OS & all you listed for 219$. Build a PC without an OS, add that 219$ and see, you get a much lower price tag.

Re:Prices are completely nuts

[doh123]

well other than the fact your using different parts altogether... a single Xeon processor thats in the Mac Pro costs $1000 from intel, not $288... their custom motherboard design and lower sells amount would also make the motherboard way more costly than mast produced ASUS stuff.... as well as many other things. You can rate an entire computer based on a small handful of specs when there are literally hundreds of specs to consider for a full machine.

Re:Not as American as you might think

[nabsltd]

Except that you don't see any desktop makers supporting 8GB of ram yet... (32GB on the mac pro.) How long has 64Bit vista been out now? Go find a consumer focused piece of hardware that can do that from HP or Dell or Lenovo..

It's pretty easy to find close to that...the Dell Studio XPS 435 supports 24GB, and comes standard with 6GB.

With an Intel Core i7-920, 6GB of RAM, 750GB of hard drive, a Radeon 4670 and a base price of $1549, it pretty much kicks the base Mac Pro around. The only real difference is that you can get a Mac Pro with two processors, but the i7 is so much better than the Xeons in the Mac Pro, you don't need more than 4 cores.

Re:What you can get for $3000 at dell.com

[RedK]

I'm pricing a Xeon Dell Precision workstation class machine on dell.ca, which is a better comparison to the Xeon based Workstation that is a Mac Pro, and I'm up to $2800 right now and guess what ? It has 2 GB DDR2 ECC ram vs the Mac's 3 GB DDR3 ECC (triple channel). It has an older, non-Nehalem Xeon processor, same ghz as the Mac but no 2 threads per core like the Mac. 1 SATA hard drive, 80 GB (WTF is this ?), same superdrive optical drive, etc...

I think Apple nailed their market just right. This isn't a cobbled together gaming PC, it's a Professional Workstation with a certain grade of hardware you're not getting in your cobbled together PC.

Re:I think that category is fading

[arminw]

....when the iMac is getting old and slow, the 24" screen will still be perfectly fine...

After you bought your shiny new superfast iMac, just sell the old one on eBay and use the money to buy yourself a secondary monitor. Since Macs consistently have a higher resale value than other computers, you may even come out with a small positive balance left over.