Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”
This illustrates the issue I highlighted in another thread:  <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097141" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097141</a><p>The fact that Apple keeps hardware and, increasingly, software, so tightly controlled leads to a situation like that of this "new" Mac Pro.  If the Apple hardware ecosystem were open like that of Windows you'd have major companies all over the world evolving the platform in wonderful ways.  Performance would go up and prices would come down.<p>There are lots of use cases where the user couldn't give a crap about a nice and polished enclosure.  You are paying dearly for design you don't need.  If you want to pay for design, fine, do so, but to a lot of us it means nothing.<p>Case in point:  We have several workstations setup for Finite Element Analysis of heat and fluid flow.  They are dual quad core i965 Extremes.  They run overclocked at 4.0GHz with memory overclocked to 2.0GHz.  They have 64GB of DDR3.  All fluid cooled.  Tons of storage as well.  They also have dual NVidia graphics cards and sport three 24 inch 1920 x 1200 LCD monitors.  Total cost, about $3,500.  Including the three monitors and the OS hard drive.<p>These are monster machines in terms of performance and they still cost less than a Mac Pro.  We have three Mac Pro's as well.<p>I would really like to see Apple open it up.  A lot of interesting things could come of it.<p>Because their hardware is not subject to competitive forces, we will now be stuck with a less-than-desirable incremental update for probably three years, if not more.