I have to pile on here. The critique linked above is very true and accurate from my pov.
I'm not defending Apple, God knows they can throw us all into a world of hurt from time to time, but in reality, I really do wonder how much profit is in a Macpro?
I go a lot of places and rarely, very very rarely do I walk into a studio, retoucher, pre press house (the few that are left), digital lab, editorial house, colorist that is running the latest and greatest MacPro.
In fact you'd be amazed at the number of G5's cranking along on their last breaths, being worked by very accomplished artists.
I have a tricked out tower, previous this latest generation, but it doesn't get even 50% of my use. Heck I now just buy new I-macs, run them till they're ugly and give em away like old lawn furniture, because honestly they're not worth much more and I don't get rid of them until they've just given up all usefulness.
Heck I run one of our servers off of a G4 dual processor because all it does is stay online and catalog drives.
Once again I'm not defending Apple, but I know in my business, I'm not going to spend a great deal of time and R+D on anything that doesn't result in better work and profits.
Also I loathe changing machines. It's never a simple clone and go procedure, half the software has to be dumped, relocated, updated, installed and then they're are issues.
I've come to the realization that it's not just money, it's time. I have one machine I cut 95% of our video on. It's slower than some of the other machines, but stable as a Rock and everything works from ftp uploads to burning dvds.
I'd like to dump it, but it works and nothing is worse than spending a whole bunch of money and then losing a week getting something up to speed.
As far as the PC thing, I've gone that route when Apple's USB was a slow as the DMV line, but in reality Vista and 7 weren't bad but just not that intuitive for a Mac User. You have to watch out for Viruses, load goofy software to read a Mac formatted drive and no offense to the PC world but man they can make some damn ugly machines.
The upside is their fast. The downside is I really don't care about another learning curve just for the sake of cutting my rendering time by 20%, relearning NLE software like AVID or Premier and buying all new PC based software just to speed my workflow by some percentage, even if that percentage is substantial.
Computers are enow like cameras. People with time on their hands and tech heads love to buy gear, but if you really knew how many of the photos the world admires were shot with 2nd or 3rd generation cameras, processed on 4th generation machines I think you'd be surprised.
We're kind of over it and unless somebody comes out with something you can't live without there is better places to put your time and money.
IMO.
BC