On Thursday, October 26, my new Mac Pro arrived. Below is a picture of it, along with my new 24-inch Cinema display (replacing a 20-inch Formac display). A Wacom tablet and MS mouse can be seen as well.
I am quite happy with this machine. It runs noticeably faster than my previous PowerMac G5, thanks to two dual-core (quad core) 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon processors and 2 MB RAM. Because it is Intel based, it can also run Windows at full speed; but I have not yet installed Windows on it. I also added a second hard drive, yielding over 400 GB of storage combined. Like its predecessor, the Mac Pro is beautiful inside and out (if you’ve ever seen the tangle of wires and mess of components in a typical computer box, the sleek and organized inside of a Mac Pro looks like a work of art). Adding the second drive was a breeze thanks to the slide-in drive bays.
There have been a few minor bumps due to PowerPC applications that did not work on the Intel Mac. However, most of those have since been resolved through free updates. And the remainder are not mission-critical apps for me. My most-used applications, including Adobe Creative Suite 2 and Microsoft Office 2004, run perfectly fine.
