http://www.apple.com/imac/features.html
No word on whether they’re upgradable, but this is a BIG step in the right direction. I’m no graphics card expert. Comments on the new options?
At $2500 the Mac Pro is looking pretty slick, too. I wish it was ~$2000 and dual core, but… can’t have everything, I guess.
in which way is the gpu any better? a GT130 is nothing else than a rebranded 9600 GSO so comparable to the old one, perhaps a few % faster.
Worlds away from anything that can be considered mid end on the desktop side actually, its a low end GPU only. (mid range is 9800 GT / GTX / GTX+ newly called GTX250, high end are GTX260+)
I was actually looking forward to the new ones in hope that they integrate one of the 65W C2Q but they didn’t 
Really wanted to get a desktop apple additionally to my macbook pro but will skip it due to this as a mac pro is out of interest, my windows machine is a Core i7 already, with a gtx280.
Also your wish can not come true technically. The Nehelem based Cpus don’t offer dual core processors at all. Only Quad core+ 
I’m not sure about that…a little better options on the high end, but integrated graphics on the two lower-end models. More like one step forward and one step back. 
(The 9400M is a lot better than the Intel GMA stuff, but it’s still nothing you actually want…)
–Eric
Well, the iMac has the same highest graphics card option (ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB ) that the Mac Pro has. I don’t recall that happening in the past. Ever.
Am I completely off on this card? Is it THAT behind? Yikes. I notice, Dreamora, that you didn’t even mention it.
That’s the big step I’m talking about.
(Oh, and my wish is about a midrange, expandable tower mac and a price range, not so much THIS exact architecture with dual core. )
Sorry, just a little thing 
For what i do know, HD 4850 != HD 4870, and GDDR3 != GDDR5
And well, NOW finally they put some RAM into the MacPro out of the box. I’m with the early 2008 and only 2gigs for all that money…it isn’t fair :lol:
I noticed a thing, in the Mac Pro configuration page it says SDRAM ECC DDR3, 1066 MHz. So it does not support anymore the FBDIMMs of the early 2008 mac pro model, and if that’s so, i suppose that the early 2008 does not support these sdram ddr3?
You are right, I missed that option as I expected that the totally overpriced highest iMac model would include the most powerfull solution already.
The 4850 is at least a mid range card, which isn’t too bad (its comparable to the 9600 when they first appeared in macs). The 512mb only version makes it lower mid range actually, the 1024mb would have been better to be ready for today and especially the future (and ready for what apple intends them for the majority of people: OpenCL)
Yet its still significantly below the higher mid range and high end cards.
What thought is the real dealbreaker for me is that Apple has decided against including the Quad Core processors in this upgrade.
Also I’ve to say that the price for an iMac with the mid range gpu is just inacceptable high. I pay $2650 here for the 24" iMac with the 3.06Ghz cpu, with the next lower one its still $2250, which definitely is worlds away from a good deal. And as always, they have excluded the affordable iMacs from upgrading to force you to buy the more expensive ones.
Perhaps its less expensive where you are living but here apple always thought it can play golden cash cow games with its customers.
Given that I get a 28" screen and a core i7 920 with 6GB of RAM and a GTX260 at less than I get the less expensive iMac with 4850, I’m sad to say that Apple, as much success they might be having on the mobile and notebook market, still is worlds away from deliverying an acceptable price / performance machine on the desktop end that is within “reasonable costs” (the MacPro is great but its price is just to high for the majority of us)
They still price their stuff at high quality, top hardware level without deliverying that.
btw: has anyone of you checked out the dual proc xeon offer? if you did so, what do you think about apples newest genius way to ripp you off? Advertising 8 core at the price and when you go to configure you see that it is the quad core only at the price
What do you guys think of the mac mini strictly from a development standpoint? I’m not big on spending $2k for any computer… especially since I don’t play games on my computers. The new GPU sounds really adequate.
The 9400M isn’t exciting, but it’s quite a bit better than the GMA 950, so I think the new mini is fine. Especially with FW800.
–Eric
For web and iphone development, the updated mac mini is great
For normal desktop development it might be slightly lacking as it isn’t exactly strong on the shader end
Can I ask a question without starting a Mac vs. Pc thing again? Why would someone pay twice as much for a Mac that has less Ram, lower end graphics card, and a slower processor when you can get all of those things at around half the price? I am NOT trying to put Mac down and am NOT trying to make PC sound better… I just honestly don’t understand. Is it stability or something else?
~LK~
Really you’re just paying more money for an Operating System. That’s the only real difference between a Mac PC and Windows PC. You could put together a Hackintosh for quite cheap if you really wanted one. I on the other hand will wait for Unity 2.5 to come out.
It’s not really the OS; it’s the hardware. You can’t actually get equivalent machines for half the price. Take a look at the Mac mini clones or the iMac clones…they tend to be about the same price or even more expensive. You can, of course, get generic PC boxes for half the price, but Apple doesn’t do generic boxes (it’s hard to make any kind of profit from them) so it’s not a meaningful comparison.
–Eric
here’s an example of what I was meaning.
Here’s one:
Here’s another:
(grabbed these two because I had shown them to someone else… links were handy)
Are those comparable to a Mac (tech) at the same price? I know very little about Mac so I wouldn’t know. If so I would be interested in looking into a Mac further.
…Aaand here come the pc users.
I once asked a guy who had a Lamborghini, why he would buy such an overpriced car instead of a family sedan that only costs a fraction of the price and can carry the family. He said “I do own a sedan…but I keep having to get it fixed up and it’s costing me a bloody fortune. The Lamborghini is my joy, I can’t stand using that sedan”. He then chuckled.
I was once a pc user too. I got an Acer laptop…long story short, I’ve never been more turned off by a computer in my entire life. The thing was ugly (very ugly), was incredibly slow, the fans were very loud, kept getting viruses/spyware and Windows ultimately kept freezing and finally BSODed me (because of hardware errors). It costed $2000 (yes, you read right…I got ripped). It was the first pc I owned, and also my last.
Then my dad wanted a computer and said he wanted a Mac (he’s never used a computer before…and chose Mac for some reason). So we go to the Apple Store and picked out an iMac. It costed $2000. I laughed (and cried).
I now own a Mac Pro, and I can run both Windows and Mac and I can customize it however I want. I look at the whole Mac/PC thing from a grand economics perspective. Which would I want: a PC that can run Windows, or a Mac that can run anything (OSX, Windows, Linux, etc) for only a little more money. Funny though is that I use OSX 95% of the time and Windows only 5% of the time for games.
But enough about me, it’s your call and your money.
Soulman: You’re paying more money. But you’re getting a better product too (well…at least I did ).
I’d say that Asus machine looks very nice. Asus makes really good products and I don’t think you would be disappointed with that machine. The Apple folks here would disagree with me because they believe that somehow Apple makes superior products even though they are very anemic with what they give to you for the amount of money you pay. Somehow paying more for something that should cost less doesn’t exactly seem right. Let’s compare…
Apple Macbook
2 Ghz Processor
2 Gigabytes of Memory
160 Gigabyte Hard Drive
Nvidia 9400M with 256 Megabytes Shared with Main Memory
OSX 10.5.6
$1299
Asus Laptop
2.26 Ghz Processor
4 Gigabytes of Memory
320 Gigabyte Hard Drive
Nvidia 9800M with 512 Megabytes of Memory that is not shared from Main Memory.
Windows Vista Home 64Bit Edition.
$949
You save $350 with the Asus Laptop.
OSX isn’t anything special. It’s just Unix with a Pretty Face put on it. You can run any OS on that laptop and heck I bet you could load OSX on it if you wanted to.
Unity 2.5 is right around the corner and it will run better on that Asus Laptop than that Mac Book.
lol… better get use to it since in 6 months we will out number you! MMuuhhaaa. All joking aside, I’m just trying to find out some info since I’ll be buying another laptop soon and want some non-fanboyish facts about them. Saying their quality doesn’t cut it. How are they quality… etc.
Thanks for your response concerning it though.
~LK~
For notebooks macs are actually a good option, because there they have competitive prices.
Especially if you are looking for a good screen, they will commonly easy kick the majority of the competition (only more expensive dell and sony are really able to compete out of my experience)
If you need something that you can take with you, is running for quite a while and allows you to do Unity, Unity Web Unity iPhone development, you can basically take any box but I would suggest the alu macbook over the “upgraded old” one because the screen is even better.
If you can’t get past a spec sheet and a price tag you will never be a Mac user. So, you don’t have to worry about it.
Apple service is mostly fantastic (if not, keep asking.) The laptops are indeed solid and reliable. There are tangible and time-saving advantages to Mac OS X. Switching from familiarity with another OS often delays someone from benefitting from them. i.e. you won’t just suddenly work faster and better.
There are intangibles that people overlook constantly. Convenience of all-in-one design, ease of upgrading mac pros, mag safe power connectors, lack of clunky latches, etc.
In general, the mac developer scene takes pride in ease-of-use, user-interface innovation, and beauty rather than customization and complexity.
The gaming scene absolutely SUCKS on macs, except from the marketing perspective (big fish little pond.) Oh, and Unity, of course – but I guess that would qualify for the developer scene.
But alas, this HAS turned into a Mac vs. PC thing and… well, that’s not what my original post was about… at all.
I do welcome any PC users to Unity (I use both PCs and Macs daily.) It’s going to be fun. Just don’t hijack threads so much. Please, start a new one if it hasn’t been discussed ad nauseam elsewhere.
Put that way, I’m guessing you are correct.
Wasn’t aware I was doing this(obviously I did here). I apologize and will refrain from posting in this thread anymore.
Quite a dissapointing release but following Apple’s tradition in not caring too much about balanced systems.
I spare myself commenting on the everlasting weird $ to € conversion rate.
The Minis came as expected but with a way too heavy pricetag on the bigger option. Extra 200€ for a 120 to 320GB HD upgrade plus 1 GB of RAM (which you definately want, due to that the 9400M utalizes 256MB of you RAM is exorbitant, you better dig out your scraper.
With the iMacs, Apple follows nVIDIA’s tradition spoofing their customers: Instead of inventing new hardware better rebranding old technology. The funny thing is that this strategy is likely to work out well as it already worked on the PC and Apple users are even more impressible by marketing. And they got more expensive too, right? I was surprised that they didn’t move on to LED instead of LCD but i also don’t know how rare LED panels are in these sizes.
Anyway the “upgrade” mostly shines with the lowest and the biggest version, in between it’s just urks. If you want to get a better understanding then you might enjoy looking up what these chips are and how they perform.
The Pros, i don’t need them at all.