The situation for Mac desktops is even more cut and dry. You may be able to swap out a drive or fiddle around with some sticks of DRAM, but no one is adding discrete cards (at least internally) to a notebook. Notebooks already outsell desktops by a healthy margin, and there’s no room for expansion inside a notebook. The answer is, for a lot of users, that it really doesn’t. When it finally came time to redesign the system, I’m reminded of the same realization Lyle came to when building his most recent desktop: why does a modern desktop need to be big?
I was a late adopter for the notebook as a desktop usage model, but a lack of progress on the Mac Pro drove me away from the design.įrom left to right: Apple PowerMac Dual G5, Apple Mac Pro (Mid 2006), Apple Mac Pro (Early 2009), Apple Mac Pro (Late 2013)Īpple tends to be pretty early to form factor revolution, but given the company’s obsession with mobile it’s understandable that the same didn’t hold true for the Mac Pro. A year later I abandoned the Mac Pro entirely for a Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro. I lamented the chassis’ lack of support for 2.5” drives. Little had changed externally since the PowerMac G5 I bought years ago. He used a BitFenix Prodigy case, a great choice. I was surprised when my gamer friend settled on building a new desktop that was seriously small. I’d been on a mini-ITX kick for a while, but motherboard and case vendors kept reiterating as exciting as mini-ITX was, the sales volumes just weren’t there. Without any coercion on my part, he opted for a mini-ITX build.
More recently, in 2012, I was talking to my friend Lyle who was setting out to build a new gaming PC. I wanted to give the platform a fair shake so I bought the fastest thing Apple offered back then: a 2GHz PowerMac G5. I spent most of my life at that point staying away from Apple hardware. This was the computer engineering department right? It wasn’t much later that I started my month with a Mac experiment. I remember walking into the lecture hall and seeing far too many PowerBooks and white iBooks. I was enrolled in ECE 466 at NCSU, a compiler optimization/scheduling class.
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