Getting Me A New Mac Pro

Apple announced today new Mac Pro's:

Apple® today introduced the new Mac® Pro with eight processor cores and a new system architecture that delivers up to twice the performance of its predecessor*. The new Mac Pro combines two of Intel’s new 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon processors running up to 3.2 GHz, powerful new graphics and up to 4TB of internal storage to offer the ideal system for creative professionals, 3D digital content creators and scientists. The standard 8-core configuration starts at just $2,799.

...

Every Mac Pro comes standard with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256MB of video memory. The Mac Pro includes a new PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot that delivers up to double the bandwidth compared to the previous generation, and supports the latest generation of graphics cards from NVIDIA, such as the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of video memory, or NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of video memory and a 3-D stereo port for stereo-in-a-window applications.

Time to eBay my MacBook Pro tonight and pick up one of these. It will make photo work much much faster. I thought about getting a single 2.8 GHz quad-core CPU and just popping in a second one myself since Apple tends to charge through the nose for components, but apparently, the pricing on the CPUs is quite competitive. Factor in the Mac Pro-specific heatsink I'd need to track down and it isn't actually worth it. (But I'll certainly be doing the RAM upgrades myself.)

I remember when I had a dual Pentium Pro tower and all my friends had CPUs that were much faster, but they were single processor machines. But under load, mine was fine and their mouse pointer's position would refresh every half a second. Since then I've been using laptops for portability, but thanks to my iPhone, I've got the web and email in a much smaller (though often not as convenient) form factor. Since I'm starting to do more photography and dealing with many gigabytes of RAW photos, the horsepower would be a welcome addition.

Besides, if I find I really need a portable computer, and not just a phone, I can run XFCE and Ubuntu on an EEE.

¶ Squeaky MacBook Pro Space Bar

So I Got An iPhone

So I got an iPhone. I hate me. A little more so after finding out that Apple is now locking out selected platforms. But my logic was this:

1. The price dropped $200 and the 4GB model was being discontinued, so this looked to be a limited opportunity to get one at this price. To all of those crying that they got ripped off, shut up, this is the way technology has always worked, you can't bitch that you didn't have the money to splurge on the iPhone when you clearly did and did so of your own free will. There was no iGun pointed at your head.
2. Ever since I parted with my Palm Vx, I've wanted a PDA.
3. I had an iPod nano, got it for free with my latest purchase, a MacBook Pro, and promptly sold it on eBay, along with my old MacBook, to help fund the purchase of the MacBook Pro. (I upgraded because Aperture really needs a respectable GPU.) But I've always wanted a portable digital music player. Hell, I've been subscribed to the Lullabot podcasts for over a year and never really sat down at my computer to listen to them.
4. My cell phone sucks. No, really. It's an old Sony Ericsson T610. My parents try to call me from time to time and it ends up being a three minute shouting match of "What?! I can't hear you!" back and forth. Now, where I flat out got "no carrier" I get two to three bars out of five.
5. I can sync not only my podcasts, video (read: TV shows) and music to it, but also my Aperture photos. Or rather, automagically scaled down JPEGs of either all or specific projects or smart folders (e.g., five stars, photos tagged Allie, etc).
6. I can violate my TOS and tether it to my MacBook Pro for when I can't violate someone's open access point.
7. I can install an ssh client on it and remote admin a server from pretty much anywhere. I would have loved to have had this back when I was running a business, this would have been wonderful.

If I were to purchase individual devices to take care of 2, 3 and 4, I could probably spend less than $300. I'd probably spend more to get exactly what I wanted. Instead, I got this. I'm pretty happy with it, though things like closed source, no SDK, etc. don't make me happy. So I hate myself a bit. Especially when people are coming up to me about it at random. Ick. Being "cool" because of an Apple product drives me bananas.

And I plan to offset the extra that will appear on my cell phone bill by switching over to Linode as a VPS from my currently crappy (and unnamed intentionally) provider. The guys at Linode are just great. I'm probably going to sell a camera lens and buy a cheaper one to make up for the cost of the iPhone itself.