or Why My Next PC Won’t Be From Apple.
I’m pretty satisfied with my mid-level Core Duo MacBook. We put 2GB RAM in it from day one, and upgraded the hard drive to 160GB a few months back. It’s been my primary PC for a month or so. My home PC lost it’s OS drive recently and I’m feeling like I should just start over with a new PC, so until then I use the MacBook.
When I’m at home the MacBook is booted into OS X almost exclusively. Some things still annoy me, and I’ve got nothing good to say about the MacBook’s keyboard, but I’m adjusting. At the office I usually end up back in XP at some point during the day, mostly because of data that I need to access in Outlook and OneNote. We got a VMware ESX server at work recently so that’s one less thing locking me in to Windows. Parallels is starting to look very interesting but until it supports snapshots it’s useless to me.
Anyhow. I’m due for a new PC, and I sure would like for that PC to be able to run Vista and OS X.
So I browse to the Apple store.
MacBook? MacBook Pro? I’m not in the market for another laptop.
Mac mini? No thanks. I spent a whole bunch of money to put two 20″ LCDs on my desk, I’d like to get some more use out of them.
iMac? Ditto. Plus, the odds of me ever buying a computer with a built-in monitor are roughly zero.
Mac Pro? Greatly exceeds my every need, to the point of being way more PC than I can justify buying.
What I need is just a Mac. In my dreams that would be something like a Mac mini, but twice as tall. Filling up those extra cubic inches would be a 3.5″ hard drive, a proper dual-DVI video card in a PCI-E x16 slot, and enough memory sockets to hold 4GB RAM. A couple of eSata ports would be nice but they aren’t a deal breaker. For that I’d pay a $400 premium over the price of a Mac mini, or $999 to start.
In some sense I’ve just described a modern rendition of the ill-fated Power Mac G4 Cube. That’s a bit disturbing but the Cube wasn’t all bad — it did have a slotted video card and a 3.5″ hard drive. If anything the Cube’s fatal flaw was being priced higher than the equivalent Power Mac.
I could be just as happy with a downgraded Mac Pro build around a single-socket LGA775 motherboard in the neighborhood of $1,299, but the chances of that happening are about as good as me settling for an iMac. A Mac slightly-less-mini stands no chance of stealing Mac Pro sales, but a lower-end tower certainly would.
Come on Steve, make a Mac that I would actually buy. Who knows, if you sell me a computer you may even be able to convince me to try an iPod or iPhone too. Maybe.
