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Comment by cones688 | Hacker News Reader

I still find it incredulous people accept these are enterpise/workstation/pro machines:

- No ability to have more than one hard drive (No RAID possibilities)

- 64GB limit on RAM (as mentioned)

- Single power supply

- "Your Mac Pro comes with 90 days of complimentary telephone technical support and a one-year limited warranty" My toaster comes with a better warranty than that...

Compare this to the dell workstations of 3yrs of next day onsite & 24/7 support, 4 hard drives and dual power supplies...

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> No ability to have more than one hard drive (No RAID possibilities)

The video production houses I've worked in the past had no local storage. Everything was over fiberchannel.

> 64GB limit on RAM (as mentioned)

Well there is theoretical and there is supported. My office Dell only supports 12GB. It currently has 16GB installed. My Macbook only supports 8GB it has 16GB installed. 16GB ECC DIMMs aren't exactly in high demand.

> Single power supply

I haven't found a "workstation" this is doing redundant powersupplies. No, the 2U Supermicro under a desk is not a workstation.

> 3yrs of next day onsite & 24/7 support

$249 for Applecare. It's cheaper than what I'm paying for my servers but more than I'd like for a desktop.

No ability to have more than one hard drive (No RAID possibilities)

That's why it has six external storage ports each capable of pushing 20GBps.

Single power supply

Workstation, not server.

Compare this to the dell workstations

Large, noisy, ugly, inefficient uses of power?

But the OS can't be raided, since it's on the single, internal SSD.

EDIT: OK, I suppose you could run it on an external drive.

Good point. The best answer there is: that's what Time Machine backups are for. Time Machine backups lag your actual storage by 10 minutes to an hour, but it's okay for most uses.

If you're worried about important data, you'd want to use external storage arrays to store your pictures/videos/genome data. Then your redundancy is handled in individual storage chassis configurations. Promise and LaCie have popular faster-than-a-single-ssd thunderbolt arrays.

> That's why it has six external storage ports each capable of pushing 20GBps.

Is it just me or something gives me the creeps about running an OS off an external drive...

> Large, noisy, ugly

Since when did the requirements of a workstation class Xeon desktop become "Super-compact" and "beautiful"?!

I would agree on the noise, except no-one has actual heard these things running in a realistic environment so there is currently no comparison.

Everyone in my office has a workstation under the desk. Note that it's a workstation not a server.

So people do care about form factor, power usage, and acoustics.

> Is it just me or something gives me the creeps about running an OS off an external drive...

The parent was talking about having your assets on externals if you had high storage requirements, the OS can live perfectly fine with any number of apps on the SSD.

> Since when did the requirements of a workstation class Xeon desktop become "Super-compact" and "beautiful"?!

We weren't always so utilitarian, Silicon Graphics did gang-buster business for a long time selling style and compactness in the workstation class. Yes, SGI eventually crashed and burned, but Apple is in a far better position to experiment with this, given that they have about $147 billion of cash on hand.

SGI crashed and burned because they stopped making beautiful MIPS boxes and tried to make ugly Windows PCs.

When the company imploded, the CEO who made that decision went to work for Microsoft. I'm not even kidding...

Just saying, but if I was selling computers and toasters, I too would offer a longer warranty for toasters.

Apple should have dropped the price tag a bit (2-3k USD maybe?) and targeted the entry level workstation demographic, or bumped up the customization limit (additional RAM etc) and most definitely included a two year minimum warranty on the Mac Pro.

But that's just my two cents.

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