Earlier this week, Lenovo announced a new line of cheaper workstations. It occurred to me that it would be possible for Apple to create a cheaper Mac Pro product. Lets see what it would look like and would Apple do it?
First, a brief overview of the new Lenovo workstations - they are single processor Intel Core i5 CPUs, using the Intel 3400-series Platform Controller Hub (PCH). The configuration allows for the use of ECC DDR3 RAM, which is an important consideration for a workstation. The configuration and capabilities are otherwise similar to what is in the new 27″ iMacs. The price for a modestly equipped Lenovo Workstation is about $1000 (Core i5 3.33GHz dual core, 2GB of RAM, 250GB HDD).
I would expect Apple to limit such a configuration to a dual core system – or at the very least charge a significant enough premium on the quad core. This would be to prevent it from taking away too much business from the MacPro line (which is currently 4-8 cores, soon to be up to 12). Likewise, it would need to offer more compelling features than a Mac Mini – the ability to handle powerful graphics cards (ATI Radeon 5850 or Nvidia GTX280), more RAM (4 slots instead of 2), and more than one optical drive. The computer case would likely be smaller than a Mac Pro (2 HDDs an 2 optical drives, or 3 HDDs and one optical drive).
The toughest question is will Apple do it? Surely, Apple has the telemetry information to know how many hackintoshes are out there, and that there is some demand to have such a configuration. But Apple seems less and less focused on computers and more focused on iDevices (iPhone, iPad) as the future of computing, would they ever consider making a new Mac model, especially one that wasn’t a laptop?
As much as the hacker/modder/gamer community might like the idea, it seems unlikely that Apple would create a new Mac desktop model. There is the possibility now, given Intel’s new product line up and the ability to plug the cheaper Core i5 chips into a Workstation platform with all the things workstation users expect, but it doesn’t seem likely. So for now we’ll continue to plug ahead with hackintoshes for the best desktop experience.
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