mojobone wrote: I have a 12-core 2010 Mac Pro on order, and having done the research, it'll be very easy and cheap to do upgrades to the RAM and add hard drives at about $10 per GB and $100 per TB.
Not to totally beat this dead horse in to submission, but these 5,1 Mac Pros are available in a lot of places. They span the years of 2010 to mid 2013 and that is the last spec before Apple went to the trash can Mac Pro 6,1.Aftermarket companies compete very fiercely for your upgrade dollar. With a dozen cores, 8 memory slots, three drive bays and three PCIe slots,
That was my choice of upgrade as well. Another composer friend of mine in Albuquerque did the same thing as well. He looked at the new prices and the prices of used stuff and it was just too good of a deal to pass up buying an older 12 core Mac Pro 5,1.
Pluses:
1) as powerful in CPU as new 6,1 mac Pro (or even more so as 12 core 6,1 is spec'd at 2.7 gHz and you can get upgrade processor trays up to 3.46 gHz for the 5,1 Mac Pro)
2) internal space for 4 HD / SSD in trays, plus space for 2 extra SSD's in a aftermarket chassis (OWC has them) to sit in one of the DVD bays (stock Mac Pros only come with 1 DVD anyways but 2 trays). That's a total of 6 drives internal.
3) RAM is dirt cheap these days. 32 GB or 64 GB or even 128 GB if you want to go there.
4) PCI slots allow addition of a USB 3.0 interface card, or PCI mounted SSD's (which run faster than SATA III specs), and internal plugin accelerators like the UAD PCI quad or octo cards.
5) USB 2.0 and FW 800 ports to hook up with a variety of new / old interaces and external hard drives.
6) huge number of units in existence makes it easy to source replacement parts if need be.
7) low price.
8) already qualified by Apple to run El Capitan operating system, and likely will have support for a good while.
and as Joy said
I have always bought aftermarket RAM from OWC http://www.macsales.com and they have a lifetime warranty. And pretty cheap.getting the Mac Model with the lowest amount of RAM and buying RAM cards separately!! Apple charges you an extra $600 for the 32 GB RAM but you could get that much RAM on Ebay for $150 and install it yourself. I installed my own RAM cards and it was actually totally easy! You can save yourself $450 right there. That's two years of a TAXI Membership or 90 submissions No need to pay through the nose for things like that
The Mac Pros from version 1,1 to 5,1 spanned 2006 to late 2013. And were similar to PC's in a lot of ways near the end. So there are a huge number of aftermarket parts to upgrade RAM, CPU, Video cards, HD, SSDs, PCI stuff - often for cheap.
Minuses:
1) No Applecare. If you are handy enough to install your own DAW software and can upgrade the OS you likely don't need this - see #6 above as well.
2) No Thunderbolt. So you can't keep up with the Joneses if that is your game. You can't buy a universal audio apollo with only Thunderbolt connections, you would have to buy one of their Apollo Firewires.
3) internal drive bays are SATA II (3 gb/s) which is one generation behind current standard. As an audio drive, SATA II is fine unless you are streaming a HUGE # of tracks. As a system drive SATA II is fine. As a sample streaming drive, its still fine, but you can go faster using the PCI mounted SSD. See #4 above. Using PCI interfaced drives makes this a non-issue.
4) big and heavy - obviously not portable, but also hard to steal.