New Mac Pros have sluggish hard drives?
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jan 25, 2008 at 1:28pm
In a Baltimore Sun report on the new Mac Pro, tech writer David Zeiler notes that he’s disappointed with the hard drive that comes with his new 2.8GHz Mac Pro. He says the Apple-supplied Seagate drive is sluggish.
“Why did Apple put a subpar drive in such a premium machine?” he asks. “Almost everything else about the Mac Pro screams: its Quad-core Xeon CPUs, its 800 MHz memory, its PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots, its overall system architecture. Why skimp on one of the most critical components? It can’t be the expense. The 500 GB Seagates I purchased from Other World Computing cost only $150 apiece. For the tiny nibble it would have taken from its huge profit margin on the Mac Pro—what are we talking about here, $20 $30?”
He also thinks that Apple could have supplied a better graphics card than the standard ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256MB of video memory. What would he like? The “acclaimed” Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT.
“Don’t get me wrong. I love my Mac Pro. It’s wicked fast and whisper-quiet, an awesome piece of hardware,” Zeiller writes. “But if you’re going to sell a premium machine, sell a premium machine—$2,800 is not chump change in the PC market.”
You can read the complete article here.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
David Says:
The new Mac Pro carries on the terribly embarrassing tradition of its predecessors at the top of the Mac totem pole by including bargain basement video cards and hard drives so small that many $600 PCs come with more storage. Apple, however, knows that many Pro buyers work in 2D and would therefore never notice a faster card. They also know that most Pro buyers wouldn’t store anything important on a single internal boot drive. If it’s big enough for the OS and applications that’s good enough. Thus they can get away with two cheap components because most will use RAID for storage and upgrade the video card (fortunately only $200 this time) if they need to. They can also get away without including an AirPort card because Mac Pros typically get wired into a spot and never move until they’re replaced.
Apple is a highly profitable business and part of that success comes from knowing what it can get away with.
Posted on January 25, 2008