Apple dribbles out some hope... I've held off buying any Apple desktop product for over four years now. Two separate problems have stopped me. The first was that the new Mac Pro (sometimes called the “trash can”), while interesting from an engineering perspective, was so constrained on upgrades that I couldn't imagine shelling out the bucks for it. The second was that the iMacs, while very cool products, had limited memory and storage options, just not enough horsepower for me to be happy with them as my development desktop. So I've been stumbling along on my nearly five-year-old Macbook Pro, which even as I write is busy overheating (as I can tell by its fan sounding like a Pratt & Whitney turbojet) in its stand.
In the past month or so I've been pondering a radical switch for me: moving my desktop to Linux, on a conventional PC. In that hardware world, getting something with specs I'd be happy with is almost trivial these days. Furthermore, the price would be substantially less than any Mac would be. I'd even gotten to the point of starting to check out specific hardware configurations, and pondering just which distro of Linux I'd move to. I've gotten very used to my Mac tools, though, so this move was not one I was really looking forward to.
Then a couple of days ago Apple did something really surprising for them: they held a meeting with the press and talked about their future plans for “Pro level” Mac products. I can't recall any similar forward-looking announcement by Apple – they must be really feeling the heat from disappointed “Pro” users, of which I am one. And what they announced is exactly what I've been waiting for, on both fronts: a modular (upgradable) Mac Pro, and a “Pro” version of the iMac.
So I guess my poor little Macbook Pro will be overheating for a while longer. I sure hope that fan holds up!
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