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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

Discounting home-made computers, which the big names are not interested in competing with, where you can you source a workstation that's more powerful than the 12-core Mac Pro?

The Dell T7600 with 2x2.2GHz 6-core Xeon chips and only 8GB of memory and a 500GB drive comes out at $4,300. The Mac Pro with 2x2.4GHz 6-core, 12GB and a 1TB drive is only $3,800.

Unless I'm missing something, the Mac Pro is still a better deal, even for Windows.

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Except that Dell is now using the newer Sandy Bridge E5 Xeon processors while Apple's using models over 2 years old.

One simply can't compare what Apple's now offering with other workstations.

Exactly. Plus, for the kind of people that really need a machine this powerful +/- $1000 isn't decisive.

And the cloud of uncertainty hovering over the Mac Pro has got to have a lot of people worried. It's bad enough that you can't get anything resembling a roadmap from Apple but it really looks like the Mac Pro is headed for extinction.

Your right I recall a few years back that sound on sound (pro audio industry bible) Mac columnist was getting worried that Apple was going to abandon the creative industrys.

Looks like Apple is transitioning from a tech to a consumer company.

They made that transition when they dropped "Computer" from their name. The rest is just logical follow-up.

Presuambly EVGA and the Other Workstaion Class kit makers will be holding a viking funeral for the Old Apple Woz would be invited to light the funeral pyre

It's a good point. A quick look on Newegg lets me know I could probably build a much better machine for around $3k even. But systems builders charge much much more for worse hardware.

Sidequestion: people still buy hard drives as small as 500GB? 3tb runs around $170.

ibuypower or one of the other custom rig manufacturers. or buy bare-bones kits on tigerdirect and put it together.

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