(no subject)

[tithonium]

I think I am ready to buy a mac pro now.

Standard configuration price: $2,499

Alterations to standard configuration:
* Dual quad-core 3.0 GHz processors - $1,498
* 750GB drive in bay 1 - $299
* ATI Radeon video card - $249
* Dual Superdrives - $99
* Bluetooth module - $29
* Wireless KB/Mouse - $59

Price after configuration: $4,732
Tax: $421.15

Standard/2day/Next-day shipping: $0 / $44 / $61
Given that the next day shipping is still only 1.2% of the purchase price, I'm quite willing to pay it. They say it'll ship in 2-3 days, so 2day SHOULD get it here by friday, and next-day is all-but sure to.

So, call it $5,196.15 total.
I'll max out the ram with kingston, since upgrading to 16gb thru apple would cost /another/ $4500, and that's just /stupid/. Four pairs of 2GB sticks from kingston will run $716.. no, I just checked their site and it's on sale, it'll be $608.

So, $5,804.15 total, plus tax/shipping from kingston. I'll buy some more drives for it later.
This will eat most of what's in my savings account, but this is also what I've been saving for, so that's okay.

Part of me wants to wait for a while and see if there's a price-drop on the hardware, but I've been waiting on buying a new system for 6 months now, until Leopard came out, and who knows when a price drop might happen. Other than, of course, the day after I buy.

[time passes]

You know what? Fuck that indecision shit. I've waited 6 months for a new system, I want to be able to play my damned games. I've transfered $6k from World Domination Plan to Checky (my ign savings and checking accounts. bad things happen when you let the user name their accounts). To the best of my knowledge the ING debit card has no daily limit. I'm ordering the mac pro now, with next-day shipping. Kingston has a two-count limit on the ram, so I'll see what I can do about that. Time to spend money.

Comments

[ebourland.livejournal.com]

That is a sweet computer.

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, it truly shall be.
I'll be putting a second drive in it soon, and putting WinXP and WinVista on that, and using both bootcamp and parallels to access those. Boot into windows for gaming, of course, for anything that isn't happy under Parallels.

I've got a 24" widescreen monitor for it already, and will be buying a second in the next 6 months or so (there's almost enough left in my ING accounts to buy one now, but I'll wait). At some point in the more-distant future, I'll buy a second video card for it, and another pair of monitors.

Yea, it shall be awesome.

[onefishjyuufish.livejournal.com]

*envies* I think I've given up on ever having another Mac. I love them, but even refurbished I can't quite afford one. That is a sweet, sweet sounding set-up though.

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

I've got a G4 Cube sitting around largely unused. It's not cutting edge by any means, but it's got Tiger on it, airport card, etc. The optical drive doesn't work, but would likely not be a problem to replace - I just haven't bothered to buy one (there was a big Thing about the optical drive, before I realized the problem was just with the drive itself. the machine has a spare logic board sitting around somewhere, as a result).

I could probably be tempted to part with it.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

Why dual superdrives?

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

'Cause it's only another hundred bucks, and it might be useful some day. Copy a disc, or burn two things at once, or have one used by a virtual machine while doing something else on the host.. whatever.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

You spend a hundred bucks on "whatever"?

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

When it represents 2% of the total, yeah, I'm not going to worry about it too much if it might come in handy at some point.

If it would, say, double the price? hell no. 10%? probably not.

Part of it is that I don't know what kind of drives they use. The hard drives, I'll buy separately as/when I need/want them. I can drop any SATA drive in there and be happy. The ram, I can deal with - it's not the Golden Apple Ram, but it's still spec'd for the hardware, which is what I care about. The video cards, I read, are Special, and random off-the-shelf happy-in-a-pc cards won't work so well without the special firmware; so, video cards I'll buy from apple, and pay their insane prices. The processors, who knows what specialness they have, but even so the prices for what I believe are equivalents are no different, so may as well buy them from apple.
So, if I might want a second optical drive, may as well pay $100 to apple for something I know will work in the system, instead of $60-$80 for something third-party that I don't /know/ will work.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

I hope you find use for it! If it ever came up, you could (of course) buy a firewire burner! :)

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. In fact, I have a rather nice read/write-everything external usb (and maybe fw too, can't remember) drive. even has lightscribe. But, still. It doesn't hurt to have it, so I'll have it.

[jeliza]

Ooh, I didn't realize you get get non-apple RAM for the new MacPros. You may have just saved my boss a whole buncha money. (I don't actually want her to convert the studio back to Macs, but if that is the decision she makes, well, it might as well hurt a little bit less.)

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

Well, /apple/ will say you shouldn't. But kingston has ram that they specifically say works with them, and I trust kingston.

[allanc.livejournal.com]

If they do literally price-break the day after you buy it (or up to about a week after, I believe), Apple will refund you the difference if you call and ask nicely.

[ladyallyn.livejournal.com]

Does this mean you'll have a 'less equipped' mac you might be willing to part with reasonably to a *starving student* in the near future? Next two quarters are going to be substantially digital and I'm thinking I going t end up needing a mac -- talk to me pretty, pretty, please?

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

Mac, no. The machine I'm replacing is my old window system. It's a decent Shuttle case, AMD Athlon XP 3000+ processor (2.16GHz), 1.5GB of ram, dual on-board VGA or there's now a generic nvidia card with dvi and vga. The system itself is four or five years old, I think. I bought it as a portable gaming rig at the time, and never ended up taking it gaming. I could probably be persuaded to drop a clean OS on it and part with it.

Unfortunately, I already offered the Cube to onefishjyuufish, and long ago promised my powerbook to beaq, assuming I ever get around to deprecating it.