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well... ya can't get AMD with apple now can ya? ;)

No, not yet. I don't expect to. Apple is Intel's new sweetheart. It was no coincidence that when Apple picked Intel and suddenly was headlining the star spots at all their developer conferences and industry shindigs. Dell just happened to immediately introduce their new AMD offerings. Intel had had lust in their corporate hearts for Apple for a long time, more than for any other company. Why, you ask? Because Apple will cut off old interfaces and make complete changes to embrace new technology at the drop of a hat. And they can be a little ruthless about it too. But this is why we no longer fumble about with serial and printer cables and now have USB. Apple ruthlessly forced their users into it. Intel couldn't get the others to do it. With the new Intel Apples, all are running EFI, not BIOS. BIOS is so hopelessly stupid and out-of-date, there's no excuse for it. But only Apple has the user base and the guts to implement it and make it a new standard. Firewire and many other things are from Apple's courage (and fanatically loyal user base). That is what Intel wants, a company that will build the machines and implement all the new technology with the industrial design flair and corporate philosophy that Apple embodies: "IT JUST WORKS". And that is why Intel has such a huge woody for Apple. I don't think we can trust Intel's CEO in a room alone with Jobs. It's kind of embarrassing.

Even more embarrassing is how Adobe has returned to Apple, kissing their hiney and gushing over how many Macs that Adobe is going to help Apple sell, yada yada yada just get a room, you two. I laughed out loud at the offer webpages at Adobe for the Photoshop CS3 beta: "gush gush gush Apple gush gush kiss kiss oh Apple be mine kiss kiss and oh by the way there's a Windows beta here too for you Microsoft idiots." Really, that was the impact. I showed it to a videographer friend who owns the whole CS2 Creative Suite for Windows and he was floored. In twenty-five years of watching PC and software vendors, I've never seen such a let-me-toss-your-salad product announcement for a hardware vendor, not to mention a hardware vendor with 5%-6% of the total market (although a high percentage of the creative professional market).

Well... AMD acquired ATI... so... you could get an ATI video card in a mac but... you still cant get an AMD processor... although the C2D/Quad is the better choice at the moment...

Exactly. Mac Pro offers the middling Nvidia 7300LE or the ATI X1950XT or one of the $1500 Nvidia workstation cards with 3d interface (not worth it except for CAD/3D/scientific workstation users). Instead of getting the $400 addon ATI card (not DirectX 10), I opted to wait until Apple supports one of the new ATI or NVidia DX10 cards. Of course, I hate Vista and don't play lots of games. But it's not an option to discard irrevocably. The market may break down Microsoft's evil intentions or the courts might make them behave well enough for me to allow their nasty Vista on my pretty Mac. So, I'll wait for a bit for a DX10 card. Leopard (OS X.5) is due before summer and I don't need it that much yet. And with the stock 950watt power supply, I don't have to worry about anything being too much for my Mac.

One of the real challenges in owning these quad-core machines is finding something challenging enough to keep them busy very long. Kind of a shock. But Leopard is the crown jewel of the Intel multi-core switch, the place it will come alive and begin to mature. Just when Photoshop CS3 releases for Mac (Photoshop is considered a religion to Mac users) and Premiere returning to the Mac along with the Avid and Final Cut Pro offerings.

You know, a Mac Pro or other Mac really does make you feel, with some confidence, that there is almost nothing you can't run. The BSD's, Linux (five major versions), BeOS, VMware appliances, X11, Solaris, Windows (every version ever published), the cutting edge realtime OSes, the list is long. I've only ever run four of them at once but it didn't even get me to 30% CPU. I just couldn't click enough stuff. To max it out, people do things like play three 1080p H.264 HD movies at once while recording all of them as a screen grab movie at 30fps. No dropped frames. That's the kind of machine it is. Not really something Grandma needs but something close to software nirvana for the those of us with strange software cravings.

but, in the end... you still have a rotten apple posing as a PC... ;) and thats how it's always going to be.

But of course. My Mac Pro is just a generic Xeon workstation from an Intel reference design. Same thing as all those AMD reference designs you get from AMD's motherboard vendors. There's nothing dirty about it and there's no reason for Apple or AMD's vendors to design their own boards and buses and such. That's so Second Millennium. Let the chip makers solve the EE design problems, not the PC makers.

One of the reasons I bought it is because I knew I would still have a powerful WinXP workstation if I didn't want to go OS X fulltime. But OS X grows on you more than you'd expect. It is user-centric. It's about what you want to do, not shoehorning into some process that Microsoft and their vendor partners think that you should do. It's insubstantial to describe but becomes more apparent the longer you use it.

jobs is the evil bastard, he makes you buy his pos hardware if you want to use his plastic/fisher price looking software.

It's not evil. It's smart industrial design that sweeps the awards year after year. I knew it was good but I was floored by this Mac Pro. It's the little touches. Like no cables at all to connect SATA hard drives (not stacked, but side by side from front to back on sleds with stainless steel thumbscrews). Cableless hard drives, isn't it about time? I think so. And the soft aluminum case is a joy to look at. I looked at one of the new Dell Xeon servers last week at a customer site. It was nice. But there was no comparison. It looked like any other Dell box but made from black/silver metal. One look and you've forgotten it.

Some of these things sound fluffy and insubstantial. But given these machines are very comparable or considerably cheaper than comparable quality machines from other vendors, the Apple makes them look like tired wannabes. And that is part of the adulation that Hollywood creative types and Intel and Silicon Valley and its user base has for Apple. For these folks, yes, it's still about making a buck. But it's about style, design, being forward-looking, using an OS and software base that is about the user, not Microsoft's control or Hollywood's ideas of what you're allowed to do. Why spend your life messing with annoying software and updates and worrying over who really controls your machine? And what about style and user experience? With Apple, this is crucial. With Windows, it's often just irrelevant or an afterthought.