Don MacAskill wrote an interesting entry a few days ago titled Where’s the Mac? to quote from his blog:So I found it interesting that at Apple’s big Mac event yesterday, Apple blew it with the Mac again. Steve fielded some…

I myself am considering a Mac.

I’m not sure whether I should get an iMac or the MacBook. Asking around at other forums, they suggest that I get the MacBook since one of my priorities is portability.

My other priorities include having a good graphics card since I will use a Mac mainly for photo and video editing. Question is, whether the extra bucks for a MacBook Pro is worth it.

I will continue considering the MacBook or MacBook Pro whilst doing my research.

Regards,
Rezdwan Hamid

I think a big step would just be a Mac mini with a pro graphics card. It doesn’t even have to be upgradable… just let me buy the top end so it will last a while.

The Mac mini seems a little too low end for its market. I hope Apple isn’t seeing low sales of the line and thus considering dropping it. If they introduced a high-end Mac mini I think it could really fill this gap well!

On the enterprise side give me a 3U Xserve with 6 hard drive bays and RAID 5 standard instead of being a $1000 option and i’ll buy at least 3 for my department alone.

I wish Apple would listen. iMacs work for a limited audience. Mac Pros work for a limited audience. The Mini works as a toy or a 2nd (or 3rd, or 4th, etc) machine. This article hits it spot on, we need a Mac for everybody else.

With all due respect, that is silly. His comment referred to $400-$900 solutions made with mediocre parts and mundate design elements.

Let’s move on.

Personally, I think this is an easy solution and has more to do with configuration than anything else.

A top of the line iMac is about $3,400… MORE than most Mac Pro configurations as well it should be…it comes with a 24″ monitor.

A top of the line Dell XPS or Alienware will easily hit the $3,500 mark, so let’s stop talking about price as a barrier to Apple making this xMac. They can make plenty of money with it

Do I really need a quad-core…no…but I can live with the surcharge it brings if the rest of the system can be configured the way I like.

Video Cards — The cards offered for the Pro are pathetic…let’s call it the way it is 1-2 generations old. It is inexcusable for the Nvidia 8800 not to be offered on the Pro…that, of course, would raise the price not lower it.

TV/PVR Cards — Another consumer must. If you have a 24″ - 30″ monitor on your desk and you don’t spend the extra $99 to make it a PVR, you are a dork, IMHO

There are cards out there that supposedly will work in the pro, but not as an elegant integrated solution with iLife. Windows Media Center snuggles up to these cards and if MSFT can do it….

I have to say, I was pretty surprised that the iMac doesn’t support TV except through a 3rd party USB solution. I suppose one could argue that Apple hopes people buy all their TV content via iTunes but we just ain’t there yet.

RAID — As I understand it, even before the addition of the expensive $999 card, Pros supported RAID just fine. Apple doesn’t have magic pixie dust and their harddrives will fail just like anyone elses. RAID 0 has saved my bacon more than once and if you argue that TimeMachine is the same thing, then you just don’t get RAID. Dell has this option and simply call it DataSafe.

Net Net:

xMac should retail between $1,800 - $3,500 w/o monitor, support current generation video cards, RAID, and TV/PVR cards.