Hi David, On 08 Aug 2006, at 2:58 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:
Are you sure you're comparing apples to oranges (no pun intended!)? The 3-year Dell warranty may not be an onsite service warranty, which would cost extra, but I can't quite see if that's what the 490 series includes or not.
The basic 3-year Dell warranty is not onsite, but neither is AppleCare. They seem to be roughly comparable.
And the 490 series you cited starts out by default with built-in Wi- Fi (802.11a/b/g).
Okay, I didn't see that. On the MacPro, WiFi (without Bluetooth) is a $49 add-on,
Well, I think your assumption that you have to go with a more expensive model is erroneous.
Well, to be as fair as possible, I wanted to do one comparison with hardware that was absolutely identical, including the video card. Unfortunately, the only video card that both Apple and Dell offer on these models is the nVidia Quatro FX 4500, which is a very expensive piece of hardware (ridiculously overpowered for gaming, even, and suitable for high-end CAD).
You seemed to think you need to have identical components in order to compare, but that's not so, as the two OS's depend on different technologies.
That's true, but of course, you can also install and run Windows XP on the Mac Pro. You could even run Windows exclusively, if you wanted.
The point is, though, Apple has long had a reputation for being overpriced compared to PC manufacturers like Dell, and it looks like, in this case at least, that reputation is entirely undeserved.
For instance, in regard to graphics cards, since the two OS's use completely different graphics subsystems, what you need to compare is not the graphics card model number, but how much graphics RAM is included.
Both models come with a 256 MB graphics card by default, but VRAM alone doesn't tell the whole story. There are many sites like Tom's Hardware <http://www.tomshardware.com> devoted to benchmarking various graphics cards at the tasks that modern OS's are increasingly offloading onto them. It used to be that only gamers, computer animators, and architects needed a high-end graphics card -- but OS X has been increasingly taking advantage of graphics card features for everyday tasks, and Vista will do the same.
This is a super-high-powered machine that would run Windows XP at screamingly fast speeds. The question is: would OS X be correspondingly screaming fast, or is it less so?
Well, at the moment, on one of these machines, if you wanted maximum raw speed in say, Photoshop, you'd want to use Boot Camp to run XP since there's no Universal version of Photoshop yet. Hopefully the unveiling of these machines puts more pressure on Adobe to hurry up the next version.
It's amazing if you think about it, but Apple only announced the transition to Intel a year ago, and now it's complete. With the release of the Mac Pro and the Intel Xserve, their entire product line is now using Intel hardware. Now it's just up to the software developpers to catch up -- and kudos to MakeMusic for releasing the Universal Finale 2007 just in time for this milestone!
- Darcy ----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://secretsociety.typepad.com Brooklyn, NY _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
