Alex4D has some interesting speculation on what Tim Cook said was “Something really great” for Mac Pro users coming this year, which we all hope will be announced next week at the WWDC. He speculates that Apple could be allowing 3rd parties to build high end machines.
Honestly this is more of a wet dream for Mac Professionals than I think is what is going to happen. To have Apple create a high end specification and let 3rd parties build the pro hardware would be pretty awesome, especially with a license fee to Apple, and specced with only XEON’s so it doesn’t cannibalize Apple’s own hardware as it will guaranteed out price it. I just don’t see Apple going that route again, NO WAY NO HOW! Not that it wouldn’t be awesome, especially if it had to have certain things, like Thunderbolt, dual XEON’s and the like, but I don’t think Apple will ever do that again.
And the speculation of late of a machine with outboard hardware via thunderbolt for expansion just pushes me more towards my next machine being a windows machine. I don’t want to, but I need the best hardware and most expansion that i can get.
And my MacPro 4,1 is having problems. My Finder has gotten slow, really slow. I click to it and I get a beachball often. And yes I have re-installed the system, but I restored from the previous one, so obviously it is software that I have installed that is causing the issue, but I don’t have the time or energy to re-install everything from scratch right now (especially right now, since I am pulling 60-72 hour work weeks, damn I am tired).
And I am having issues with Mail of late, that I am stating to see popping up on forums. It is fixable, but keeps coming back.
And I am having sound issue. The sound out ports come and go, luckily I have an edirol with optical sound out, but that doesn’t seem to work with windows, so I am constantly moving my optical out cable, what a damn pain!
And yes I do have a PC NVIDIA GTX 670 installed in my Mac so I don’t see any startup screens, just black, but it also takes a while to boot. A minute or more, but when I boot into Windows 8 via bootcamp I am up and running in 30 seconds!
I think my machine is just getting old, and my 24GB of RAM is proving too little, though I do run a lot of crap.
Still if I could afford it (which I can’t) a new machine in the next year would be awesome, especially if we have a kid before too long, as I will likely have to try and do more work from home, and my current machine could use an upgrade.
Hmm. Let’s hope Apple releases something really great.