Where to Buy a Mac Pro
Be sure to read How To Choose a Mac for overall tips and ideas on selecting and buying a Mac.
Recommended hardware for the Mac Pro is found a variety of reports and reviews throughout this site. OWC has a wide variety of upgrades including memory, internal hard drives, external storage, and much more.
Go get one
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Getting the best Mac Pro for you
The best value is always the base model. With the base model, you get 80% or more of the performance for less than half the price of the top-end model. Very few users need 8 cores, so stick to the base model, or ensure that you do not waste your money by first engaging us in consulting.
Remember, enough memory and fast drives matter a lot— so budget for the whole system. But unless you like configuring and testing yourself (which takes hours), you can just have an MPG Pro Workstation show up ready to use.
For the best value, the 2.8GHz and 3.2GHz models are a great choice. The sweet spot for peak performance at reasonable cost (but at some premium) is the 3.33GHz 6-core model. For really demanding jobs (eg video and sound), the 12-core 2.93GHz model is a draft horse.
One thing: skip the Magic Mouse.
The hidden hexacore
As of late August 2010, Apple hides the hexacore choice from view. It is listed under the quad-core choice, click the Select button to see the option.
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Upgrading drives and memory
When upgrading to an MPG Pro Workstation, you’ll want to buy the Mac Pro itself with no extra memory or drives, since the upgrades are part of the MPG Pro Workstation upgrade process.
- You can get a new Mac from our recommended vendor B&H Photo. B&H charges sales tax only in New York (but be aware of use taxes in some states), and B&H often includes extra software and free shipping. Here is our hand-selected list of recommended models.
The commission is a lot better for us at B&H (no cost to you), so thanks for using B&H if feasible. - You can save 15% over new by buying refurbished from the Apple Store (newly-released models take 6-8 weeks to appear).
- You can get a new Mac at Apple, and custom configure it — but that’s an expensive proposition compared to a “just right” high performance MPG Pro Workstation.
