The Cheesegrater returns

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Just saw the new products announced at Apple’s WWDC. Their hardware design team for the Mac Pro finally got a clue and went back to the “cheesegrater” case design. They finally got a clue to those of us that like expand the capabilities of the Mac Pro machines of old, instead of that damn garbage can, which was next to impossible to upgrade. Now the next iteration of MacOS, Catalina, i’m Not so sure about. Dark mode on Mojave still gives me fits. I’m even less enthused on iPadOS. Why fix something if it ain’t broke?

My favorite part was the $999 they charge for a monitor stand, not the monitor itself, just the stand, VESA mount not included either for that price. The cheese grater itself starts at what $6000 for crap specs? Yeah the case is nice but not worth $1000's.

obviously they are marketing to the folks for whom not only is cost no object, it IS the object in terms of the more you spend, the more you show off how rich you are and how high atop the darwinian totem pole you are.

What kind of crazy fool pays $USD999 for a monitor stand? I paid less than that individually for each of my high end monitors. Even my Vive Pro, which is notorious for its exorbitant pricing cost less.

those "crazy fools" see the rest of us as mere riffraff. it's all about class and perceived class.

1. I used to work for Apple as a contractor employee.

2. It’s drool worthy if you look at the specs. Apple’s aiming these machines at the high end workstation market (outfits like Disney/Pixar, CalARTS, music production studios, publishing houses, to cite a few examples). However, i’ve Learned from Working as a Apple support tech, you don’t want to buy the latest hardware when it initially hits the market, since rev.0 systems almost always have issues that don’t show up until put into general use. I remember all too well the video issues with the iBooks, as well as the issues with the original flat panel iMac (which I still consider to be a stupid design). It’s best to wait about 3 month’s after that products introduction, when they ship the rev.1 hardware.

3. I don’t even have the money for this machine. I could barely afford my 2009 cheesegrater at $300.00 when I bought it 2 years ago off eBay. I’ve slowly been doing upgrades on this beast over the past year. (I’m expecting delivery of an MSI Radeon RX 560 video card any day now, since the nVidia board that shipped is woefully underpowered running Mojave. Once I have more money, it’s back to eBay to buy a new processor tray with 2 quad core Xeons, another 32 gb RAM, and eventually replacing the quad core xeons with 2 six core cpus.

The biggest gripe i’ve always heard about the trash can Mac Pros was that they were next to impossible to upgrade. Being that I used to build my own PC’s (and gave it up since I got tired of windows crashing and burning every 5 minutes) going back to Apple gave me a lot less grief. I can run Windows 7 64-bit on my Mac and it has yet to crash. (Don’t even talk to me about Windows 10, which, to me is a steaming pile of excrement.) Someone in their design team finally wised up and listened to customers of this class of machine, where expandability is a MAJOR selling point.