Marco.org

I completely agree. I’m hooked on OS X, but I’m tired of pathetically slow and small laptop hard drives, no drive expandability, only 2 RAM slots, and anemic video cards. (MacBook Pro fans: even your new 8600M is nowhere near as fast as the $139 desktop 8600 GT.)

I’m buying a Mac Pro as soon as I can, but much of its price and capabilities are wasted on me. Its $2500 stock configuration contains nearly $1500 worth of CPUs. Apple could save $1000 by simply switching to the Conroe quad-core equivalent, and while using DDR2 would decrease the number of RAM slots to 4, it would also significantly boost performance (FB-DIMMs are slow) and reduce the RAM cost.

Apple would sell a lot more pro desktops if they were $1500 Conroe-based towers. And they’d still sell almost the same number of decked-out Mac Pros, since the people who need raw speed at any price (mostly pro video editors) are easily willing to spend the extra $1000-3000 for more cores or obscene amounts of RAM.