The Mac Pro, Leopard. Oh and Vista too
19 April 2007

"The Mac Pro [is easy to upgrade]. OK, it wasn't rocket science [with PCs] but [with them] there's always the moment when you drop a screw inside the case and have to chuck the base unit around the room to get it out again"

It's been just over a week since I got my Mac Pro so high time I wrote something about it. In this blog entry I'll do just that as well as talk about Windows Vista and a brief word on Leopard.

There's a good deal of information about the Mac Pro as a computer elsewhere on the internet so I don't plan on giving anything like a full review of the machine here. Suffice to say that it looks just as cool on the inside as it does on the outside. But before I get on to that a bit about the machine itself. The unit I've gone for is a 2.66GHz Quad core. First off, I resisted the urge to buy a new 8-core 3GHz unit. The small matter of an extra £1,000 was enough and rather than buy the 3GHz Quad version instead I opted to go for the mid-speed 2.66GHz processor and buy some more RAM instead. I bought two 1GB sticks to give me a total of 3GB. Nice.

The other extra I got was two 500GB hard drives to add to the 250GB boot drive that ships in the case. I've set up a mirrored RAID giving me an always-up-to-date backup of my important data. This will do me fine until Time Machine is with us.

The one thing I must say about the Mac Pro is just how easy it is to add in extra RAM and hard drives. It's never been as easy with the PC's I've had. OK, it wasn't rocket science but there's always the moment when you drop a screw inside the case and have to chuck the base unit around the room to get it out again. No such problems with a Mac Pro. The hard drives go in bays that just slide out of the case. These caddies include integral screws that you just attach to the drive before pushing back into the computer. No cables required (not even power) the drive plugs straight into the mother board. Genius!

It's no more difficult fitting the RAM. Just pull out a riser card, push in the RAM sticks on the comfort of your desk and then push the riser back into the case. A doddle! A good deal of thought has obviously gone into the design of the whole unit. Despite there being 3 hard drives and 4 fans in the machine it's virtually silent - an amazing achievement.

There's been a good deal of talk on the Forums with people saying that they're holding out for a new design for Apple's top machine. To be honest, until I bought one I wasn't a huge fan of the "cheesegrater" look. However, it grows on you - in a nice way - and the whole package has been so obviously thoughtfully put together that I can see why Apple don't want to change a winning forumla. Add to that the fact that while the outside of the unit is similiar to the PowerMac G5 it replaces - the internal design is revolutionary and only 8 months old. I can't see them changing it any time soon and I now believe that they shouldn't.

Windows Vista
Now having a good deal more drive space, I decided to try out Apple's Boot Camp to dual boot into a trial of Windows Vista. The new look OS is an improvement on XP but from the horror stories I've heard I wouldn't recommend upgrading. A fresh install appears to be OK if your hardware (and software) is up to it. I understand Microsoft include software on their web site you can run on your computer to test it for suitability for Vista.

In operation, Vista looks pleasant enough but from the screen shots I was expecting more. The Mac Pro is plenty fast enough to use the Aero desktop, but this isn't as impressive as I thought it was going to be and the novelty quickly wears off. Mac OS X wins on the looks front - especially if you add something like the UNO desktop to get rid of the brushed metal windows.

On other features: Gadgets are similar to the Mac's Widgets but again OS X does it better. On Windows the Gadgets are to the right hand side of the screen while the Mac's Dashboard is in a separate layer - much better for flipping in and out of. The worst new feature of Vista is the stack. This is Microsofts attempt to copy the Mac's Expose function, but where Expose shows you either the current application's windows, or all open application's windows in a way that you can easily see what's going on in live windows, Vista uses a horrible 3D interface. While this is a live preview of each window, it quickly fills up and makes it impossible to jump straight to the program you want without having to tab through all of them. Rubbish.

The only half decent feature I could see was the live preview as you hover over applications in the task bar.

Windows Vista apparently includes an instant search feature like the Mac's Spotlight. I haven't tested it on Vista but I hope it's as good as Spotlight. I can't live without it, personally. Even finding applications is quicker in Spotlight than navigating through the Finder to the program's icon.

So, verdict? Nothing there to make me think of going back to Windows - even for one second. I'll happily remove Vista when the trial expires and grab back the 32GB of space for Mac OS X. Boot Camp is clever, but I'll stick to Parallels for the rare occasions I need Windows XP.

Leopard
I'll finish with a quick word on Leopard. For those who don't know this is the next version of OS X. It was due to come out during Spring but Apple announced this week that it's being postponed until October. On the plus side it makes me even more sure that I did the right thing buying my new machine now, but I'm still disappointed about the delay. Still, hopefully it'll be worth the wait. And having seen Vista, the current version of OS X is already better so I can't see this wait hurting the Mac one bit. It's already ahead of Windows so Leopard (when it does arrive) will just push it out of sight!