Why buy a Mac Pro today? Why not wait?
With a new Mac Pro on the horizon (sometime between now and June 2010 seems credible), why would you buy a Mac Pro now?
- If it takes until June for a new Mac Pro, you have 3 months in which your workflow benefits from improved efficiency. For professionals, time saved is money saved.
- Reliability, backup speed, etc might themselves be important immediately, rather than waiting, especially if you have a creaky old system, or a laptop, etc.
- A new model might not change the capabilities or performance much beyond some incremental clock speed differences, and 6 CPU cores instead of 4 (Most programs can’t even use 4 cores well).
- Prices are very approachable, especially for refurbished models. The new models might or might not be similarly priced, and refurbs typically do not show up for at least a month after release of a new model.
- You can move hard drives, solid state drives (SSD) into any new Mac you get later. This go-round, there is also a good chance that memory might remain compatible.
- So what if you buy now and sell at a $600 “loss”: that’s a $200/month rental and in the meantime you’ve had the productivity gains. While that might not make sense for an individual, anyone whose time is money should just run the number.
That said, if you have no immediate need, there’s no reason to buy now, you might as well wait. But for professionals whose time is money, waiting is not necessarily a rational choice.
