Thursday, July 10, 2008

Art Director Porn

Anyone who works at an agency knows that Art Directors love to upgrade their Macs. They are constantly on the lookout for more RAM, a bigger monitor and the latest version of Photoshop. Morality has no place when it comes to an AD’s Macintosh. He or she will beg, borrow or steal in an effort to put together a better system.

But what is their goal? What would the ultimate Mac be like?

A trio of Art Directors at my agency decided to find out. They went to the Apple site and started to configure a new machine. If there was an accessory, they picked it. If there was a choice, they went for the more expensive one. And in the end they had done it. They had created THE WORLD’S GREATEST MAC!

(drum roll)

It’s a Mac Pro. And it comes with:

Two 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors
32GB of RAM
Four 1TB Hard Drives
Two 16x SuperDrives
Two 30" flat panel HD Displays
iWork '08 , Final Cut Express, Aperture and Logic Express preinstalled

And you can take home this massive chunk of Steve Jobsian brilliance for the low, low price of just:


That’s right boys and girls. For the price of a decent car, you can finally have the best Mac on the block.

At least until the next Keynote Speech

5 comments:

anon said...

No RAID card to make the 4 x 1TB drives work efficiently. Only one video card, 4 x 30: screens would be almost enough space for InDesign and palettes. You could easily add another €3k to this price.

adhack said...

To save space, I left out a few things. Here are the complete specs:

• Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
• 32GB (8x4GB)
• Mac Pro RAID Card
• 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
• 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
• 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
• 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
• NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 1.5GB
• Two 16x SuperDrives
• Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel)
• Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel)
• Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse
• Apple Wireless Keyboard (Western Spanish) + User's Guide
• AirPort Extreme Card (Wi-Fi)
• Quad Channel 4Gb Fibre Channel PCI Express Card
• Apple USB Modem
• iWork '08 preinstalled
• Final Cut Express preinstalled
• Aperture preinstalled
• Logic Express preinstalled
• AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro (w/or w/o Display) - Auto-enroll
• Mac OS X Server (Unlimited-Client)
• 1-year Family Pack subscription
• Xsan 2
• HP Photosmart C7280 All-in-One Printer, Scanner, Copier

(You could increase the price by $800 by choosing four 300GB 15,000-rpm SAS drives instead of the 1TB ones. But I thought the Terabyte Drives sounded more impressive.)

Unknown said...

At least they give you free shipping.

Random_Tangent said...

I actually worked a freelance day on a machine specced out like that (it was sans the 1.5GB video card)

Billionaires tend to overkill on their equipment.

I almost wept when I had to leave the room.

shaun. said...

a thing of beauty.