[i83N]

Although why bother with Xeons, ECC and dual FirePro video cards for home use? All of those features add a lot of cost without much benefit to a home desktop users use patterns.

It's not home use, who at home now has three 4K monitors? Those components are more stable in work. Xeons are server CPUs there main advantage is stabebl working with floiting point algorithms, witch are mostly used in when working withe hight amours of data for example raw 4K video.

[Anvh]

The smart thing to do is wait for it to be released and use it for awhile -- and then rant.

It's pretty clear when looking at the expansion possibilities, where should we need to wait for? Companies who have invested heavily in specialized audio and video hardware in form of PCIe are pretty much screwed over by apple. I don't think they will replace or adapt their 10,000+ investment and be happy about it. When they have render farms or servers that use infinite-band or external PCIe i've actually no idea how they will adapt those... maybe adapter inside the racks. But those connection are 2 to 10 times as fast so it's a kind of wasted investment then...
Most likely they will buy one just for the sake of having an Apple solution when they need it but it might be more cost effective to get linux or windows, after all most of Mac software also works on those.

Beside that apple is really pushing 4k but Thunderbolt does not have enough throughput, since RAW 4k footage needs about 3.4GB/s and TB 2.0 is 2.0GB/s theoretical and i'm very curious about the I/O lag in that state since it's in one way only mode then...


As for indication of a price, the top model will be $7,500 or higher, Dell solution with roughly the same spec come out at around that price.

[Anvh]

It's not home use, who at home now has three 4K monitors? Those components are more stable in work. Xeons are server CPUs there main advantage is stabebl working with floiting point algorithms, witch are mostly used in when working withe hight amours of data for example raw 4K video.

You might want to read the whole conversation before that

[Homo_erectus]

It's not home use, who at home now has three 4K monitors? Those components are more stable in work. Xeons are server CPUs there main advantage is stabebl working with floiting point algorithms, witch are mostly used in when working withe hight amours of data for example raw 4K video.

The stability difference between Xeons and i7s is the difference between 99% and 99.99%, worth it for big companies that require 100% uptime. Worthless in practical ways for most everyone else. ECC will help with the random cosmic ray that twiddles a bit here and there in your memory resident database once or twice a month, but a couple of twiddled bits a month isn't a big deal for anyone who doesn't keep huge sets of data in memory for long time periods. 12 cores sounds great on paper but actually *Decreases* performance in some applications, a number of them creative suite applications, and then there are applications like Acrobat that are *still* single threaded.

Sure all of these features are nice to have, but for lots of the uses that real people are going to be putting these machines to, those features actually contribute to lower performance. Add in the lack of expansion other than via cable, the dearth of actual thunderbolt peripherals and their high cost and, well, who is this for again? Are there really shops out there that are going to go buy thunderbolt based external storage for their workstations?