What the heck man!

Who was your target audience for this piece?

To me it appears you were targeting mac users... I know this has to be since a windows user does not care about software updates for macs. So why is it you would insult your target audience???

If you hate apple so much then stop writing articles for mac users!

In regards to your complaints about the graphics card you might as well be complaining that they do not make users pay for the FC card also! Or even a raid controller! While they are at it how about they force users to buy the new 27" screen as well! There is a reason for the little button on the store for you to customize!

GPU acceleration is only suitable for SOME workloads. Many tasks can't be broken down into massively parallel short units of work. Having ONLY 640 stream processors rather than the 800 of a 4870 won't be an issue to many prospective users, so why should they have to pay for a 4870 when they don't need it?

Try looking at what the competition are offering. HP for example offer 3 preconfigured Xeon Z800 workstations. The lower 2 have single CPUs and don't even ship with a video card. The top end ($9000) model ships with a Quadro FX 3800, which isn't even nVidia's top model.

[quote]Workstation users want lots of CPU horsepower and RAM, with high reliability, which the Mac Pro's deliver nicely.[/quote]

Almost as if GPU-accelerated data processing doesn't exist! Oh, wait, it does!

Oops, I clicked on this story on Google News and did not notice it was a link to the Inquirer where they like to insult Apple and their users. It is the only time I visit this crap site.

that all workstations are graphics workstations? The latter is a distinct subclass, not the whole species. Workstation users want lots of CPU horsepower and RAM, with high reliability, which the Mac Pro's deliver nicely.

If users don't want high performance 3D graphics why should they have to pay for them? If they do want them then it's on the options list.