Of course Apple has announced the new strange MacPro, though not answered all of our questions about it. And my biggest question at the moment is about BootCamp, which because of Windows limitations of only being installed within the computer.
I know on Laptop’s the only solution then is to partition your SSD harddrive and install windows there, but on current MacPro’s you can use an entire secondary hard drive as your bootcamp partition.
The new MacPro is run by a single SSD harddrive, so as of now it looks like you will have to partition, and install Windows on that, which means you will need a very large and expensive SSD drive to fit a full working windows environment and a full working Mac environment.
My current MacPro’s boot drive is a 3TB hard drive, which has 1.43 TB used. And 902.4 GB of that is used by my user. The scary part of that is that is with all of my extensive iTunes library on an external SAS. And that still leaves 500GB of data for my system and applications on Mac, which is pretty big for an SSD drive. I know there are ways to move your user to a separate hard drive, but it isn’t easy and is easy to really screw up your system! And honestly I wouldn’t really want my user to be external to the system.
Of course much can be moved out of my user, I have 219 GB in Parallels, which I could easily stop using now that I use bootcamp. And I have 117 GB in MobileSync files, which seems like an awful lot of iOS backups. And I just looked and After Effects CC has 107 GB of Disk Cache in my Application Support folder! Youch! Need to figure that out. Hell I have 14.3 GB of Mailboxes for Mail! Youch that is a lot of files, but still files within my User folder that would take up too much space on a single SSD drive!
Well it is a moot point right now, as I have my old MacPro, and couldn’t afford a new model even if it was out and all the questions were answered, but what freaks me out the most is see myself leaning more towards building a bad ass PC, and I really don’t want to give up on Mac as a platform. So maybe a Mac Laptop and a PC, or so I got he Hackintosh route? Some say they are so unstable and hard to upgrade (as you have to wait till files are updated and hacked so you can upgrade), but then I could have a Mac and a PC and have what I really want, a tower bigger than a current old tech MacPro. Something like the ASUS z9PE-D8 WS motherboard in the EEB form factor with dual Xeon’s. That could literally stomp on the single Xeon in the new MacPro and i could run Dual NVIDIA Geforce for Titan’s for graphics. That would be an amazing machine, expensive sure, but I would have so much fast internal storage and I wouldn’t have to invest in a ton of money in Thunderbolt peripherals (especially since Thunderbolt has not really caught on, and it doesn’t seem to be catching on very big in the PC world which means it will always be a niche product).