I have to say that if I was buying an Apple computer today, Apple has just made my choice a great deal simpler. Pairing a good processor with a ton of cache memory (hence the Xeon) which raises the price a great deal and then leaving out reasonable video card options means that I'm better off going with a Windows computer for $1000 less and purchasing a Mac Mini separately.
These Intel Core 2 Duo chips are fast - the fastest on the market. The 6600 and 6700 models, which are only a few hundred dollars, are blowing past the fastest Athlon 64's (which were the industry performance leaders a month ago), and they're doing it at half the price. But adding hundreds of dollars worth of cache memory to these chips does not increase their performance nearly as much as putting in a high quality video card. If I'm going to spend $2400 on a computer, I'm not going to waste that money on the Xeon version of the Core Duo - I'm going to put it into something that's going to give me a much bigger performance boost. The other part to this is that Intel is making these new Core 2 Duos at prices that could be used for the Mac Minis or the iMacs - but apparently Apple isn't using them in these. HP has already introduced a model that starts under $1000 with these new processors. There's really no reason to purchase a low or midrange computer now without one of these processors. They're cheap, consume little power, and they're faster than anything else available. And so if I have to purchase a Mac, I'm going to spend as little as I possibly can on it. Their low and midrange computers are severely underpowered compared to PC's in the same price range, and their high end machines seem to be misconfigured for getting the most bang for the buck on the applications a majority of users will be running. -Tyler __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
