Those of you familiar with my propensity to succumb to temptation for the latest and greatest may have been looking at my setup, marvelling at the mildly dated hardware, rolling your eyes and thinking “that’s not going to last long”. And I’m happy to confirm that, in accordance with prophesy, the hardware upgrade juggernaut has finally rolled through my part of the world. Oh my word yes.
In the first week of January, Apple announced an upgrade to the Mac Pro line of workstations. They would have 8 cores as “standard”, through the use of two 4-core Harpertown Xeon CPUs. What they didn’t highlight was the fact that the “standard” configuration was actually customisable down to a mere single 2.8GHz 4-core CPU, making it available for a comparatively-quite-reasonable A$3300.
And naturally, I bought one. Read on for initial impressions.
